Philosophical Inquiries into Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering: Maternal Subjects 0415891876, 9780415891875

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ROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

Philosophical Inquiries into Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering Maternal Subjects Edited by Sheila Lintott and Maureen Sander-Staudt

Philosophical Inquiries into Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy

1 Email and Ethics Style and Ethical Relations in Computer-Mediated Communication Emma Rooksby 2 Causation and Laws of Nature Max Kistler 3 Internalism and Epistemology The Architecture of Reason Timothy McGrew and Lydia McGrew 4 Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity Edited by William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith 5 Epistemology Modalized Kelly Becker 6 Truth and Speech Acts Studies in the Philosophy of Language Dirk Greimann & Geo Siegwart 7 A Sense of the World Essays on Fiction, Narrative, and Knowledge Edited by John Gibson, Wolfgang Huemer, and Luca Pocci 8 A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy Robert B. Talisse 9 Aesthetics and Material Beauty Aesthetics Naturalized Jennifer A. McMahon

10 Aesthetic Experience Edited by Richard Shusterman and Adele Tomlin 11 Real Essentialism David S. Oderberg 12 Practical Identity and Narrative Agency Edited by Catriona Mackenzie and Kim Atkins 13 Metaphysics and the Representational Fallacy Heather Dyke 14 Narrative Identity and Moral Identity A Practical Perspective Kim Atkins 15 Intergenerational Justice Rights and Responsibilities in an Intergenerational Polity Janna Thompson 16 Hillel Steiner and the Anatomy of Justice Themes and Challenges Edited by Stephen de Wijze, Matthew H. Kramer, and Ian Carter 17 Philosophy of Personal Identity and Multiple Personality Logi Gunnarsson 18 The Force of Argument Essays in Honor of Timothy Smiley Edited by Jonathan Lear and Alex Oliver

19 Autonomy and Liberalism Ben Colburn 20 Habermas and Literary Rationality David L. Colclasure 21 Rawls, Citizenship, and Education M. Victoria Costa 22 Objectivity and the LanguageDependence of Thought A Transcendental Defence of Universal Lingualism Christian Barth 23 Habermas and Rawls Disputing the Political Edited by James Gordon Finlayson and Fabian Freyenhagen 24 Philosophical Delusion and Its Therapy Outline of a Philosophical Revolution Eugen Fischer 25 Epistemology and the Regress Problem Scott F. Aikin 26 Civil Society in Liberal Democracy Mark Jensen 27 The Politics of Logic Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the Consequences of Formalism Paul M. Livingston 28 Pluralism and Liberal Politics Robert B. Talisse

29 Kant and Education Interpretations and Commentary Edited by Klas Roth and Chris W. Surprenant 30 Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity Alison Stone 31 Civility in Politics and Education Edited by Deborah S. Mower, Wade L. Robison 32 Philosophical Inquiries into Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering Maternal Subjects Edited by Sheila Lintott and Maureen Sander-Staudt

Philosophical Inquiries into Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering Maternal Subjects Edited by Sheila Lintott and Maureen Sander-Staudt

NEW YORK

LONDON

First published 2012 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2012 Taylor & Francis The right of Sheila Lintott and Maureen Sander-Staudt to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global. Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper by IBT Global. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Philosophical inquiries into pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering : maternal subjects / edited by Sheila Lintott and Maureen Sander-Staudt. p. cm. — (Routledge studies in contemporary philosophy ; 32) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Motherhood—Philosophy. 2. Motherhood—Psychological aspects. 3. Childbirth—Psychological aspects. I. Lintott, Sheila. II. Sander-Staudt, Maureen. HQ759.P485 2011 306.874'301—dc23 2011027122 ISBN13: 978-0-415-89187-5 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-14768-9 (ebk)

Dedicated to Sara Ruddick (1935–2011), an inspiration and source of wisdom and courage for thinking mothers everywhere.

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction

xiii xv 1

SHEILA LINTOTT AND MAUREEN SANDER-STAUDT

PART I Maternal Norms, Practices, and Insights 1

Sara Ruddick, Transracial Adoption, and the Goals of Maternal Practice

21

JEAN KELLER

2

Where Did I Go? The Invisible Postpartum Mother

34

JENNIFER BENSON AND ALLISON WOLF

3

Into the Mouths of Babes: The Moral Responsibility to Breastfeed

49

CHRISTINE OVERALL AND TABITHA BERNARD

4

Tales from the Tit: The Moral and Political Implications of Useless Lactational Suffering

64

LISSA SKITOLSKY

5

Motherhood and the Workings of Disgust

79

SHERRI IRVIN

PART II Maternal Roles and Relations 6

The Practical and Theoretical Challenges of Mothering with Disabilities: A Feminist Standpoint Analysis MAEVE O’DONOVAN

93

x

Contents

7

Mothers, Children with Disability, and Postmodern Sainthood

107

CHRISTINE A. JAMES

8

Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Dynamics of Mothering a Daughter

126

ALISON STONE

9

Why Don’t Philosophers Tell Their Mothers’ Stories? Philosophy, Motherhood, and Imaginative Resistance

138

JOSHUA SHAW

10 On Stepmothers as Hybrid Beings and World Travelers: Towards a New Model for Care-full Ethics

151

BECKEY SUKOVATY

PART III Maternal Phenomena, Phenomenology, and Aesthetics 11 Creating Life, Giving Birth, and Learning to Die

165

BROOKE SCHUENEMAN

12 The Pregnant Body as a Public Body: An Occasion for Community Care, Instrumental Coercion, and a Singular Collectivity

178

JULIE PIERING

13 Becoming Bovine: A Phenomenology of Early Motherhood, and Its Practical, Political Consequences

191

SALLY FISCHER

14 The Aesthetics of Childbirth

215

PEG BRAND AND PAULA GRANGER

15 The Sublimity of Gestating and Giving Birth: Toward a Feminist Conception of the Sublime SHEILA LINTOTT

237

Contents xi Contributors Index

251 257

Figures

I.1 “Hidden Mother” phenomenon. 14.1 Judy Chicago, Birth Tear E 2. 14.2 Daniel Edwards, “Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston.” 14.3 Daniel Edwards, “Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston.” 14.4 Daniel Edwards, “Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston.” 14.5 The Crowning NP 4. Needlepoint by Frannie Yablonsky.

2 216 217 217 218 229

Acknowledgments

Without our authors, this volume would be very short. So, we fi rst thank the philosophers who contributed their work, time, and mental energy to this project. We thank you for your excellent essays and your patience with us as this volume has developed, slowly, but steadily. We must also thank the organizers of and contributors to the Philosophical Inquiry into Pregnancy, Childbirth and Mothering Conference at the University of Oregon in May of 2009, for inspiring this volume. Moreover, we thank Routledge Press, and especially Erica Wetter, Felisa Salvago-Keyes, and Eleanor Chan, for their interest in and support of this volume as well as Routledge’s editorial staff for helping us during the fi nal stages of bringing this volume to fruition. Finally, we especially thank our respective departments, universities, colleagues, friends, and families for their support and encouragement. Sheila Lintott expresses her deepest gratitude to Eric, who is her constant, and to Sonja and Jack for helping her grow into being a mother and, in so doing, teaching her more than any number of philosophy books ever could. Maureen Sander-Staudt is grateful to all of those who have supported and informed her ponderings, most notably her own mother; and those who have served, in Sara Ruddick’s words, as inspirational “mothering persons.” She thanks those who have encouraged her to write on the topic of motherhood and to persevere despite the many obstacles of combining maternity with professional philosophy. She is especially appreciative for the good humor and companionship of David and her children, Gavin, Aeden, and Molly, who keep her grounded and well supplied with opportunities to reflect upon the institution and practice of motherhood.

Introduction Sheila Lintott and Maureen Sander-Staudt

PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRIES INTO PREGNANCY, CHILDBIRTH, AND MOTHERING Philosophical Inquiries into Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering unites a diverse group of philosophers to discuss the persona, the practice, and the position of mothers. Some of our authors take up new themes, such as maternal aesthetics; others pursue old themes in new ways, such as motherhood as existential confrontation with death. The subtitle, Maternal Subjects, is intentionally ambiguous to convey that the collection includes analyses of a range of maternal subjects—from pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, mothering, and beyond—to subjective experiences of the people who navigate these maternal waters and why and how these individuals may feel, at least sometimes, as if they are more subject than sovereign. We present this collection as another installment in the growing volume of works engaged in the important rethinking of maternal subjects and we dedicate it to Sara Ruddick, whose work on mothering began in the early 1980s and who gave us the trailblazing study of mothering, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, in 1989. We dedicate this volume to her memory in gratitude to her for forging a path through the dark forest of paternalism, throwing light on a multitude of maternal subjects. A fitting metaphor for this project recently came to our attention. A common technique used to photograph infants and babies in the nineteenth century was to prop the baby on the mother’s lap and to drape her with drop cloths that could serve nicely as a background.1 Once the photograph was taken, any small amount of the mother that could be seen from under the drop cloth was cropped out or covered with matting for display. The effect was to remove the mother from the picture. This practice was obviously intended to keep young children safe and secure during lengthy photo shoots, but it also metaphorically reflects a willingness to ignore or downplay the importance of maternal subjectivity. Arguably, this willingness has been equally prevalent in mainstream philosophy. Although adult experiences feature prominently in canonical philosophical thinking, as do adult reflections on (especially male) experiences of

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Sheila Lintott and Maureen Sander-Staudt

Figure I.1 “Hidden Mother” phenomenon.

childhood and parenthood, the subjective perspectives of mothers typically serve as backdrops rendered invisible in our field. Thus, this nineteenthcentury photographic practice, known now as the “hidden mother” phenomenon, illustrates our aims here: to make visible the invisible, to make background foreground, to make maternal subjects, in the many senses of that word, the central focus of philosophical inquiry. There is no shortage of writing about pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering in popular culture, yet contemplation of the philosophical significance of these topics is lacking, especially philosophical accounts that are offered from a subjective maternal point of view or about a subjective maternal point of view. In some ways this oversight is surprising, given the scope and influence that has been attributed to mothers in other fields such as psychology or sociology, as well as the fact that, at least to date, the biological maternal relation is one of the few universals in human experience, along with death, which is a topic that has been given much philosophical attention over the ages. However, this oversight in philosophy is also sadly predictable, not only because women have been discouraged or prevented from studying and practicing philosophy in most cultures, but also because subjective narratives from mothers in particular have gone unsolicited, unpreserved, and overlooked; those that are evinced are often discounted as unworthy of serious attention. Although progress has been made in recent years, historically there are pitifully few women, and even fewer mothers, to be found writing philosophy or being written about in a serious manner in philosophy. (We can leave aside here the many barbs

Introduction 3 directed at women and stereotypes perpetuated about women in the works of great male philosophers.) For example, within the canon, we rarely hear about the mothers of great philosophers—their names, lives, or beliefs. When we do hear about them, it is for their success in male terms, perhaps in their education. The implicit suggestion is that mothering is not an impressive feat. Mothers again serve as backdrops, whereas the fathers of great philosophers are usually discussed amply in their biographies for their influence on their children, usually their sons. Motherhood and related maternal experiences have been alternatively ignored, derided, exploited, or naturalized to the point of the utmost reduction of their philosophical implications by most of the famed philosophers of the West and East. For example, although Plato posits that female guardians should be mothers in order to propagate fit offspring for the state, he also thought it feasible and desirable for them to hand over their infants to the care of “less rational” workers. Plato presumes that “rational” women have nothing unique to learn from the work of mothering, and that pregnancy and childbirth are mere bodily functions ideally removed from and subpar to more rational endeavors. Like the “hidden mothers” of the nineteenth-century tintypes, Aristotle, along with most other historical philosophers, virtually ignores women and the philosophical nature of motherhood, except to surmise minimal biological roles for mothers as temporary fetal homes. Within the Chinese philosophies of both Confucianism and Taoism mothers similarly lack subjective presence; whereas Confucius assigns women to roles subservient to fathers and husbands, Taoism extols the maternal and life-giving forces of nature but says little specifically about motherhood per se and, in particular, about how it is subjectively experienced. Among more religious Christian philosophers, mothers are simultaneously revered and silenced, confi ned to private realms in which their maternal roles are properly contained. The figure of the Virgin Mary, although a prevalent maternal symbol, is a submissively silent demigod and an impossible asexual maternal ideal. Kant and Rousseau naturalize motherhood, making it an essential and innate component of femininity characterized by womanly instincts, which in effect completely removes pregnancy, childbirth, and the care work involved in mothering from the moral realm. These are activities that women—and, for these thinkers, only women—allegedly do in some sense naturally; they aren’t rational, autonomous, and intentional activities, thus no mother deserves moral praise for the considerable effort involved in these activities. Within the contemporary philosophical subgroup of women philosophers, mothers continue to be underrepresented, especially mothers who come from groups with intersecting social and political disadvantages, such as women of color, lesbians, or mothers struggling with their children’s or their own disabilities. Philosophy continues to be a subject dominated by white and masculine perspectives and methods; this of course doesn’t

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explain, but merely restates, the fact that women—more so mothers, and even more so mothers who differ from a white heterosexual norm are underrepresented in philosophy. Partial explanation for the lack of mothers can be found in the practical constraints of combining motherhood with professional philosophy, both of which can be extremely demanding of one’s time and energy. Although motherhood is a practice rife with philosophical dilemmas, issues, and poignancy, it is also demanding labor that leaves scant time for philosophical speculation, especially in formal contexts. For these very reasons, critical speculation about motherhood that draws from or dwells on subjective accounts of mothers is especially desirable. This is not to say that philosophers have been entirely silent on the subject of motherhood or that subjective reflection on or reflection on subjective accounts of pregnancy or childbirth have been altogether absent. As women have become more vocal contributors to philosophical thought, motherhood has increasingly become a topic of scrutiny. Enlightenment philosophers such as Mary Wollstonecraft vehemently refute the characterization of motherhood as a natural institution propelled by instinct and innate feminine drives as expounded by Rousseau and others. Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, and more recently Adrienne Rich and Sarah Ruddick, explore the potential for maternal experience to revision social and political structures, as well as the possibility that persons of any gender can mother (Rich 1976; Ruddick 1989). Rich is notable for being one of the fi rst philosophers to explore pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood from a subjective perspective, a methodology for which she was harshly criticized. Philosophers, including Rich, Mary Daly, Shulamith Firestone, and others fervently reject the social pressures that channel women into being mothers, shedding light on forces that push women to mother and to do so in ways that are exploitative, demeaning, and limiting (Rich 1976; Daly 1978; Firestone 1970). The controversies raised by these women have come to philosophical fruition most visibly in the development of a care ethic, an ethic that is associated with the work of Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings in the 1980s (Gilligan 1982; Noddings 1984). Characterized by these authors as an ethic originating in the moral perspectives of some women, care ethics has often been correlated with motherhood as a practice and an ideal. The authors in this volume, although not all care ethicists, often build on the pioneering work of these philosophers and the emerging ethic of care. Many of their fi rsthand speculations reflect a subjective philosophical methodology of standpoint theory common to both feminism and care ethics, and help to extend philosophical conversations about motherhood into the twenty-fi rst century. As a whole, this collection reflects four key foci. The starting premise of the volume is that motherhood is a philosophically rich relation and activity. Our commitment to a philosophical exploration of experiences associated with motherhood means that we seek to challenge romantic and naturalistic accounts of motherhood, to trouble ideal ascription of “mother,” to

Introduction 5 encourage reflective mothering and reflections on mothering, and to move maternal subjects to the fore of philosophical consciousness. This book seeks to draw out the philosophical implications of motherhood by compiling reflections from diverse authors, many of whom are mothers, who each in their own way articulates how motherhood can contribute to the cultivation and practice of the love of wisdom. A second aspect of this collection is an emphasis on the need for subjective explorations of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering as an expression of diversity and solidarity in the understanding of these activities. The essays included here suggest the importance of thinking carefully and critically about how “motherhood” should be understood, who is and is not identified as a “mother,” and how mothers are (in)variably idealized and demonized. It is a common pitfall in discussing motherhood to essentialize the concept of motherhood by assuming that motherhood is a singular thing, and that one person’s subjective experience can stand in as a universal statement about the essence of maternity. Contrary to this tendency, the subjective expressions in this collection are not meant to represent all women’s experiences but to serve as a sampling of localized perspectives. Although we often cluster together the topics of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, we hope to avoid the false impression that these are necessarily correlated activities. Whereas the connotations of motherhood are most clearly associated with women who have genetic and biological relations with children to whom they give birth and for whom they care, not all mothers are biologically related to their children, not all mothers give birth to their children, and not all mothers mother their children. For similar reasons, the connections to generational difference and female biology are intended to have equally slack correlations with motherhood. A “mother” cannot be essentially characterized as an older adult responsible for the nurturing of children, not only because “adult” and “child” are themselves slippery concepts, but because mothers continue to nurture children into adulthood; and, in a sense, an adult may mother another adult (even her own mother), and a child can mother an adult or another child. Likewise, although mothers are often assumed to be “women” in some clear sense, queer theory expands on Ruddick’s groundbreaking genderfree analyses of motherhood to further illuminate how presumed female sex and gender markers can be only loosely linked to mothering, as demonstrated by recent cases such as the “pregnant man”—a transgendered person who identifies as male yet retains the ability to become pregnant and give birth. Queer theory thus poses challenges for clear dichotomies of sex and gender and reveals how individuals may claim the right to be both a mother and a father in myriad sociobiological senses. These understandings impact social configurations of marriage and the family and have significant ramifications for nontraditional relations. All in all, the philosophical understandings of motherhood implicit in these chapters are complex and

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Sheila Lintott and Maureen Sander-Staudt

variable, in part because motherhood is itself a complex and variable concept and practice. A third aspect of this collection is that the authors make meaning of their own experiences of pregnancy, birth, and care-giving in order to explicate how interpretations of motherhood are misrepresented and constrained by social and cultural structures. Motherhood, although residing in subjective experience, moves beyond the individual to wider social relations. This collection indicates that motherhood is an identity acquired through many paths; is generative of moral and political questions; and is complicated by an array of contingencies, including disability, gender expectations, blended families, and laws and policies. Here we have only just begun to indicate the wide range of subjective perspectives available on mothering. We hope to motivate more and more intersectional and interdisciplinary investigation and analyses of the topics raised in this volume, for what we offer here is only a starting point from which to further explore dimensions of race, ethnicity, nationalism, gender configuration, and generational differences as they intersect in a myriad of ways with the concept and practice of mothering. A fourth aspect of this book is a focus on embodiment, an often missing element of philosophy, as a key element of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering. Although we aim to avoid an essentialist view of motherhood that ties it to female experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, we also wish to foreground the usually ignored philosophical significance of these experiences and to consider the implications of the fact that motherhood can be replete with embodied and physical significance. As Adrienne Rich states, “to have borne and reared a child is to have done that thing which patriarchy joins with physiology to render into the defi nition of femaleness. But also, it can mean the experiencing of one’s own body and emotions in a powerful way . . . the gestation and fruition of life which can take place in a female body . . . has far more radical implications than we have come to appreciate” (1976, 37, 39). The physical experiences that are tied to motherhood vary, but all mothers experience some degree of the significance of the body in maternal activity; whether it is felt in the lumbering pregnant body or in the exhausting efforts to soothe a recently adopted daughter through her fi rst nights in her new home, the body and the physical are obvious. Maternal labor is synonymous with caring for the body and the material world, whether it be cooking, feeding, bathing, or cleaning. A strict mind-body dualism is resisted by many of the authors in this volume in that the significance of these physical activities for the reflective life, and for praxis in the actual world, is of central concern. The authors show that although it is mistaken to believe that only women who have physically given birth are capable of being mothers, motherhood includes embodied states and activities that are decidedly relevant to every major branch of philosophy, yielding innovative insights for the examined life.

Introduction 7 The main claim of this book is that pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood yield subjective and embodied standpoints from which to consider a wide array of philosophical areas and topics. This certainly includes metaphysical and epistemological questions. Mothers often fi nd themselves flummoxed by the metaphysical questions posed by their children, and they must explain and justify what they feel they have come to know as mothers. Some of these questions include queries about whether divinities, fairies, ghosts, and the like are real; where babies come from; whether plants and animals have feelings; what happens to someone when they die; and many more. Moreover, the metaphysical status of persons is brought into a provocative light when mothers reflect on the meaning of their time gestating a forming life, caring for a vulnerable new life, or feeling the pain of a child as if it were one’s own. Likewise, as noted by several contributors, motherhood provides a perfect opportunity to raises aesthetic questions about beauty, sublimity, and disgust, given the prevalent interactions with bodily substances, odors, and visuals. Scrutiny on the experience of mothering with and to individuals with cognitive disabilities sheds light on questions and issues in philosophy of mind and epistemology. Finally, the contributors to this collection share a conviction that pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood provide not only opportunities but responsibilities, both individual and collective, to contemplate political and moral questions about justice and the good life. Together these chapters exemplify how motherhood can be a philosophical endeavor, informed by beliefs in need of scrutiny, that imparts perceptions of reality and meaning that shape human life in basic ways. Philosophical Inquiries into Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering is divided into three parts: “Maternal Norms, Practices, and Insights”; “Maternal Roles and Relations”; and “Maternal Phenomena, Phenomenology, and Aesthetics.” The fi rst offers reflection on and critical analyses of maternal norms and practices and highlights the philosophical insights that these norms and practices can yield. In the chapter 1, “Sara Ruddick, Transracial Adoption, and the Goals of Maternal Practice,” Jean Keller adapts Sara Ruddick’s concept of preservative love to the practice of transracial adoption and shows how preservative norms of transracial adoptive maternal practice are both similar to and different from those that guide nonadoptive families. She discusses two maternal goals that are universal but present in a critical way only for some groups of mothers, such as mothers who adopt Korean children: these goals are kinning and helping children cultivate their racial-ethnic identity. “Kinning” refers to the practice of creating a family and cultivating a family identity. Parents of Korean adoptees often begin the kinning process when they share photos of their new child with friends and family, and later, when they care for a child and tell stories that integrate the child into the extended family. In kinning, adoptive mothers and fathers of Korean children engage in the work of narrative repair, that is, they provide narratives that help children make sense of their

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placement, and provide counterstories to damaging stereotypes and expectations. In the case of the second but related goal, mothers help transracially and transnationally adopted children develop positive racial-ethnic identities. In racist societies, such children need to learn how to anticipate and respond to racism, as well as to recognize and address adoption-related grief. Ultimately, Keller concludes that the self-transformation necessary to engage in transracial adoptive maternal practice is not unique, but greater than is typical in nonadoptive families, and are not simply child centered, but relational. In the second chapter, “Where Did I Go? The Invisible Postpartum Woman,” Jennifer Benson and Alison Wolf survey six popular pregnancy and childbirth self-help books to show how the dearth of information devoted to the postpartum period of birth forwards women’s oppression. Their fi rst fi nding is that the erasure of postpartum mothers in this literature is accomplished through content choices and rhetorical moves that deemphasize the challenges of the postpartum experience while emphasizing the needs of others, especially the infant and woman’s partner. Their second fi nding regarding the treatment of the postpartum experience in pregnancy lay literature is that it promotes sexist gender stereotypes, places women in double binds, and makes oppression appear natural and normal. Although some of the most painful experiences of the postpartum period (episiotomies, perineal tears, wounds from cesarean sections, and infections) are mentioned in these self-help manuals, as well as some of the challenges of breastfeeding, they are treated at times with paternalistic brevity. Benson and Wolf surmise that the needs of postpartum women are derived from the needs of others in the pregnancy literature, with an emphasis on the stereotypical role of the selfless female caregiver reflective of larger cultural narratives. Further, heterosexual couples and nuclear families are the assumed norm, which leads these texts not to address self-defi ned physical needs relating to a woman’s recovery from childbirth, but those related to her partner’s sexual and reproductive needs. The literature places women in double binds, such as instructing women who have just given birth to take sitz baths three times a day for twenty minutes each, when many women fi nd it difficult to do so while caring for their infants without assistance. In this case, women are placed in the double bind of having to choose to meet their own needs in a seemingly selfish way or to meet the needs of their infants in a seemingly caring way at the cost of prolonging and intensifying the pain of their own recoveries. By making these double binds appear normal and natural pregnancy literature contributes to women’s psychological oppression and obfuscates socially induced dimensions of the conflicts posed by postpartum practices. To correct for these damaging trends, Benson and Wolf call for a lay literature that gives ample attention to the postpartum woman and her experiences for her own sake. The two chapters that follow bring to the fore controversies surrounding the moral obligation of women to breastfeed their children. In the third

Introduction 9 chapter, “Into the Mouths of Babes: The Moral Responsibility to Breastfeed,” authors Christine Overall and Tabitha Bernard defend the idea that women have a moral obligation to breastfeed their children because of the overwhelming benefits associated with the practice. Although they recognize that women do not always have the choice to breastfeed and do not recommend that the practice of breastfeeding be legislated or compelled, they encourage women to make the choice to breastfeed when possible and when otherwise mitigating factors are absent. They trace the political aspects of the medicalization of birthing and the profit motives of formula companies and baby-food manufacturers; they argue that although social factors may make breastfeeding seem more difficult, undesirable, and unnecessary, the value of breastfeeding makes the assertion of the responsibility to do so essential, despite social impediments. At the same time they are critical of public health campaigns that exaggerate the risks of choosing not to breastfeed; they advocate instead for campaigns aimed not only at women but also at men and social institutions, and for campaigns that do a better job of portraying a variety of women breastfeeding across different circumstances. Ultimately, they recommend that breastfeeding be normalized as a common practice and as the default way of nourishing babies, while recognizing that some conditions make breastfeeding so difficult or damaging that the moral responsibility to breastfeed is mitigated or even removed. In the fourth chapter, “Tales from the Tit: The Moral and Political Implications of Useless Lactational Pain,” Lissa Skitolsky expands on the idea that the pain associated with breastfeeding for some women reduces their moral obligation to lactate. Drawing from Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of “useless suffering,” Skitolsky redirects the locus of moral obligation to argue that society is obliged to recognize and alleviate as much as possible the useless suffering associated with breastfeeding. She observes an ironic dilemma in sociopolitical practices that simultaneously treat breast milk as a valuable commodity but at the same time limit its distribution to members of biological, heterosexual, nuclear families. Skitolsky is hopeful that recognizing lactational suffering as sometimes “useless” may provoke the development of alternative means to distribute breast milk to make it more accessible, without making pain seem a necessary or natural component of this goal. She specifically examines the practices of cross-nursing and of milk banks as potential ways to reduce pain while still making breast milk available to a wide population. She speculates that cultural repugnance to such practices (evident in the international indignation evoked by Selma Hayek cross-nursing a child of another woman in Sierra Leone) reflects a deep-seated loyalty to a conception of maternal individualism and a discomfort with maternal collaboration and reciprocity. Were such practices more accepted, however, the breastfeeding dilemma would be undermined: women would not have to choose between giving their children breast milk and avoiding the pain associated with breastfeeding. In particular she recommends the expansion of milk banks that screen and regulate the exchange of breast milk,

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underscoring that breast milk is a valuable national commodity often left out of economic and agricultural calculations. With chapter 5, “Motherhood and the Workings of Disgust,” Sherri Irvin closes this section and offers an exploration of the value and costs of what she calls a “suspension of disgust.” Irvin argues that the suspension of disgust increases protection, intimacy, exploration, and knowledge, although it is not without its costs. Moreover, it is relative and responsive to social norms. Not only is a mother perhaps less likely to feel disgusted by her child than is the child’s father, but her disgust might vary for different children and for children at different ages. Based on her own experience as a mother, Irvin speculates that one might be likely to see her child as “radiantly pure” even when the child confronts her with stimuli that would be downright disgusting if associated with anyone but her child. The extent to which and how one’s own child might seem “radiantly pure” is not, however, constant and may also be gendered in that fathers seem to report being more easily and frequently disgusted by their children. Irvin examines how and why maternal relations might alter one’s feelings of disgust; for her, it seems that maternal love blocks an appreciation of her son as disgusting, although it does not block her ability to recognize that others might reasonably be disgusted. More than not being disgusted by her son, she reports seeing him as “radiantly pure” and suggests that this is relevant to not feeling disgust because disgust is associated with and perhaps caused by fear of contamination. Irvin’s study of motherhood and the workings of disgust centers on two interrelated aspects: disgust as a situated, contextually cued response and disgust as an effective tool for social norming. As many of the chapters in this collection do, the analysis in this chapter brings to the fore the embodied nature of mothering and the relations and work it involves while making clear the social, political, and ethical implications of aesthetic concerns. For instance, as Irvin shows, if others react with disgust to a woman’s child, consciously or not, she likely gets the message that her job is to intervene and reduce or remove the disgusting elements; if she fails to do so, then she is judged to be failing her child, and this judgment is morally laden. The political aspect is made more obvious when we realize the gendered nature of this judgment, that is, women are more likely to be judged for failing their children in this manner than are men. The second part of Philosophical Inquiries into Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering focuses on the philosophical significance of maternal roles and relations, the fi rst considered is how disability effects and informs the mothering role and the relations mothers have with their children and the wider community. Switching perspectives between being a mother of a disabled child and being a disabled mother, the authors of chapters 6 and 7 examine some aspects of mothering with disabilities and perceptions of mothers of children with disabilities. In chapter 6, “The Practical and Theoretical Challenges of Mothering with Disabilities: A Feminist Standpoint Analysis,” Maeve O’Donovan considers what it is like to be a mother with

Introduction 11 disabilities generally and, more specifically, to be a mother with ADHD. Although O’Donovan acknowledges certain disadvantages to mothering with disabilities, she also identifies able-bodied ignorance in motherhood scholarship and uses feminist standpoint theory to illuminate unanticipated advantages of disabled mothering. O’Donovan notes that feminist theory and disability scholarship have not always been congruous because whereas feminism often disassociates from motherhood and sexuality, women with disabilities may aspire to meet these social ideals. Nonetheless, feminist disabilities studies yields a unique feminist standpoint and forms an intersection of fields yielding important information on mothering with disabilities. The perspectives of disabled mothers, although diverse, reveal problems with mother blame, state surveillance, and social and economic obstacles that frustrate maternal goals. O’Donovan shows how these problems distinctly manifest in physical and cognitive disabilities and offers a sustained analysis of socially induced challenges of mothering with ADHD. She underscores the epistemic injustice of how mothers with ADHD are excluded from knowledge production about their own lives. Attending to the subjective standpoints of mothers with ADHD suggests certain advantages to mothering with disabilities, such as having an enhanced understanding of dependencies and opportunities for independence and skill development in the daily life of a child. Chapter 7 likewise explores the issue of mothering and disability, but in it author Christine James explores the topic by taking a unique focus: interrelated associations among mothering, disability, and Roman Catholic sainthood. In her chapter, “Mothers, Children with Disability, and Postmodern Sainthood,” she assesses cultural and religious tendencies to consider women who mother disabled children, and disabled children themselves, as saints. James supports a postmodern framework that reclaims the lives of saints by highlighting the ambivalence of their moral and ethical status in that sainthood can encompass moments of anger, defense, and rage. More specifically, James examines the suggestion that both disabled children and their mothers are instances of “victim souls,” individuals who attain special status because they are seem as suffering for the sins of others. James scrutinizes how mothers of child-saints may use morally ambivalent communications or technology to bring their child’s message to the media, as in the case of Audrey Santo, mother of severely disabled Linda Santo. Each year, Linda Santo is visited by thousands of pilgrims hoping to witness her purported ability to perform miracles; for this ability she has been beatified by the church and declared a “Servant of God,” the fi rst step toward canonization. James notes how through a postmodern lens, Audrey Santo can be seen as a mother who also functions as a marketer, PR specialist, and agent who does not accept suffering but creatively and strategically cares for her disabled daughter. Borrowing from Erma Bombeck’s “Mothers of Disabled Children,” James criticizes the Catholic bishops’ official Pastoral Statement on People with Disabilities for its endorsement of virtues such

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as patience and acceptance that are belied by the practices of mothers of disabled children like Audrey Santo (Bombeck 1993). Addressing the sex scandals plaguing the Roman Catholic Church, James fi nds potential leadership value in mothers who are activists and skeptics of modernist archetypes of obedience. She concludes that the future of society and of the Roman Catholic Church might just be secured by mothers who are, in the right combination, selfish, selfless, and independent. We turn to another kind of maternal relation in the eight chapter, “Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Dynamics of Mothering a Daughter,” by Alison Stone. In this chapter, Stone considers how the experience of being the mother to a daughter may differ from that of mothering a son. She offers a gender specific rereading of feminist psychoanalytical thinkers, emphasizing mothers’ lived experiences of these relations rather than focusing on the effects of mothers’ attitudes upon their daughters. After establishing that most mothers relate differently to male and female children because of memories of past family relations and other factors, Stone seeks to correct for the psychoanalytical bias that casts mother-daughter relations as distinctively inferior to mother-son relations in the work of Sigmund Freud, Helen Deutsch, Nancy Chodorow, Jane Flax, and others. Throughout these works Stone traces the evolution of the idea that the mother-daughter relationship is inferior alternatively because it is an occasion for repression, a near-pathological longing for total mergence, a bond of empathy prone to selflessness, and an inadequate symbiosis. Although Stone agrees that mothers are more ambivalent toward their daughters than toward their sons, she fi nds that this need not be bad for mothers or daughters because it can stimulate patterns of maternal development based on pre-Oedipal and pre-patriarchal stages. These stages have the potential to generate creative forms of development that allow expression of maternal experiences and yield sources of cultural renewal and transformation. Joshua Shaw ponders an overlooked but striking phenomenon in the ninth chapter of this volume, “Why Don’t Philosophers Tell Their Mothers’ Stories? Philosophy, Motherhood, and Imaginative Resistance.” Framed by conversations with his own mother and supported by observations on his own philosophical research and co-parenting experiences, Shaw explores the philosophical significance of the fact that male philosophers tend not to philosophically engage the topic of motherhood. This is so even when they reflect on the ethical importance of parent-child relations or when they fi nd parenting metaphors illuminating. For example, philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Kierkegaard, and Harold Bloom use examples and metaphors of fathering and fatherhood to make their points. Although partial explanation is found in the exclusion of women from the practice of philosophy, this can only be a partial explanation because, as Shaw points out, outrageous thought-experiments are commonplace in philosophy. In short, if it seems possible and worthwhile to imagine what it would be like to be God, a bat, a brain in a vat, or on a sinking lifeboat (just to name a few

Introduction 13 well-known philosophical thought-experiments), why does it seem less possible and less worthwhile for a male philosopher to imagine what it would be like to be a mother or pregnant or in labor? What explains their imaginative resistance? Shaw admits that it might seem that male philosophers tend to omit women’s perspectives, particularly their mothering perspectives, because of the unfamiliarity, difficulty, and discomfort of imagining having a differently gendered experience. Most philosophical thoughtexperiments, including those that seem rather bizarre, are gendered male or gender-neutral, and as such they allow the male philosopher the safe and familiar comfort of his own gender while he stretches his imagination to seemingly challenging lengths. Shaw concludes, however, that the resistance is social and political as well, for the greater challenge lies in the fact that the very experiences involved in maternity are those that are disparaged under patriarchy: being embodied, having a fluid identity, and being dependent and depended on. The route toward more philosophical theorizing about mothers and motherhood must likewise be social and political. For example, there is a real need for social spaces in which mothers’ stories can be shared and these spaces need to be accessible, at least sometimes, to men. Shaw implies that men will need to be encouraged to enter these spaces when invited and should be made aware of the politics behind the fear they might feel at the prospect of hearing, conversing about, or reflecting on mothers’ stories, stories which threaten to undermine their assumed sense of the self as autonomous and wholly self-sufficient. In “On Stepmothers as Hybrid Beings and World-Travelers: Toward a New Model for Care-full Ethics,” Beckey Sukovaty maintains that the roles and relationships stepmothers occupy are undertheorized, underappreciated, and often misunderstood; in the stepmothering role and relations, we find not only a space for reconsidering the ideals of motherhood and the ideal mothers but also a home for a new model of an ethic of care. Fueled by the inspiration she finds in Maria Lugones’ work on “world”-traveling, loving perception, and responsible playfulness and in Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of joy, Sukovaty confronts the stereotypes of the wicked stepmother and our shared cultural fantasies about the selfless, loving birth mother. Sukovaty argues that stepmothers, rather than being seen as evil interlopers, should be acknowledged as occupying an advantageous position from which to develop the sort of loving perception that can significantly contribute to a child’s flourishing. She aims to purge care ethics of any implicit reliance on unfeasible and damaging ideals of mothers and motherhood in order to cultivate a more promising model on which the theory can be based. Informed by theorizing about stepmothers, an ethics of care can be more easily extended to encompass voluntarily assumed and humanly navigated caring relationships. Drawing on Eva Feder Kittay’s work on “distributed mothering,” Sukovaty pushes for an ethics of care that emphasizes equality, justice, interdependence, and lived experience and that neither implicitly nor explicitly perpetuates unhealthy and even damaging ideals. Revisioning the cultural concept of “stepmother”

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and reconsidering the lived experiences of stepmothers makes more salient the stark contrast between the ideal and real mothers. In fact, the reality of stepmothering discloses care work that is partial, imperfect, and shared; thus, the reality of stepmothering can serve as a “reality check” to the fantasies, ideals, and unreasonable expectations that are often projected onto birth mothers. An ethics of care informed by or potentially based on a model of care-full stepmothering promises to make obvious and appreciable the importance of care in various kinds of relationships of various degrees of intimacy. The third part of this collection explores the phenomenology, representations, and aesthetic experiences that are encountered in and associated with motherhood. Turning from philosophical questions about nurturing life to questions of impending death, in the eleventh chapter, “Creating Life, Giving Birth, and Learning to Die,” Brooke Schueneman looks at how pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering can yield insights for the whole of human experience, namely, preparation for death. Working from Heidegger’s call to live with lucidity that death is imminent, Schueneman shows how maternal experiences can be processes of self-realization that are conducive to the contemplation of oneself within a greater whole. Pregnancy lends itself to a realization of the fi nite nature of life in part because of how it commonly results in shifting generational identities. Assessing the teaching of Epicurus and the Stoics that death is not to be feared, Schueneman describes how the risks and ambiguity of pregnancy lend rationality to the fear of death and also provide an opportunity to imaginatively live life more fully. This is because learning to die requires more than accepting the reality of one’s physical death; it requires that we also allow our individuality to die. Pregnancy allows women to experience this death of individuality, at least in part, by providing an occasion to withdraw from the concerns of the outside world into the maternal-child relation and to fully emerge themselves in the processes of creation, nurturance, and death. In the twelfth chapter, “The Pregnant Body as a Public Body: An Occasion for Community Care, Instrumental Coercion, and a Singular Collectivity,” Julie Piering notes the incongruities surrounding the pregnant body as a public and widely understood symbol of private intimate relations and the relatively private sphere of the family. Moreover, whereas women usually know they are being judged coldly and harshly based on their appearance, Piering explores how pregnant women enter new territory with their new bodies as they are often judged favorably for their appearance—even for their growth. Pregnant women are proud and pleased to be increasing in size, something that nonpregnant women will rarely experience. Even more rare and remarkable is the positive attention a pregnant woman receives in so far as that positive attention is due to what her body is doing, rather than to simply how it looks. While a pregnant woman’s size invites unfamiliar warmth and even praise, pregnant women also grow familiar with being treated in paternalistic and judgmental manners, often being what and what not to eat, what and what not to drink, and what and what

Introduction 15 not to do, sometimes by complete strangers. For example, a woman sitting at a bar invites intense scrutiny from strangers. Piering looks into the meaning and significance of the public interest in the pregnant body, an interest that can invite questions of a personal nature that would be unacceptable in almost any other conceivable public context. Curious about the range of ways in which the public is public, Piering canvasses various ways in which the pregnant body is public: by suggesting an expansion of community, by being accessible to observation, and by being itself a sort of community: “a singular collective.” Piering observes that the female body, including the pregnant body, is most typically studied from an allegedly objective perspective outside the body; rarely are women’s felt, subjective experiences seriously theorized. Piering follows in the tradition of philosophers such as Iris Marion Young and Lucy Bailey who have made such study. According to Piering, a pregnant woman is likely to fi nd herself differently related to her body and to her community. The body is also discussed in the thirteenth chapter, Sally Fischer’s “Becoming Bovine: A Phenomenology of Early Motherhood and Its Practical, Political Consequences.” Fischer fi nds in maternal subjectivity a new opportunity to reconsider mind-body dualism, for example, for critically evaluating Cartesian ontology and epistemology, as well as Lockean ideas about independence and freedom. Fischer employs Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology in her exploration of how a new mother’s selfconception might shift, at least temporarily, from being entrenched in a hyper-rational sense of self as a disembodied mind, to a sense of self as embodied and encumbered, as she comes to realize she is “becoming bovine.” Fischer argues, however, that this shift need not diminish her sense of self value; rather, it can be personally enlightening and publicly correcting. Furthermore, Fischer explicitly considers the practical and political dimensions and implications of the lived experience of the early, very intense months of motherhood. Practically, she argues that a study of maternal embodiment, and in particular of the fi rst few months of motherhood, discloses the social and political import of taking sexual difference as real. In her analysis of the social and political implications of different ways of theorizing the embodied experience of motherhood, Fischer employs Luce Irigaray’s analysis of and insistence on the importance of sexual difference. In light of “becoming bovine,” Fischer’s chapter also carefully scrutinizes contemporary U.S. labor laws and workplace policies, all of which implicitly assume a liberal conception of a rational, independent, and autonomous self as a norm. Her specific focus is on maternity and family leave policies, but her conclusions are applicable to all workplace policies insofar as they fail to recognize persons as particularly situated, embodied, and experiencing beings with likewise particular needs and struggles. The authors of the last two chapters confront maternal subjects on explicitly aesthetic grounds. These authors explore the lack of aesthetic attention that has been afforded to pregnancy and birth which they fi nd

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particularly unsettling given that the significance of the fact that, as Adrienne Rich put it, “all human life on the planet is born of woman” (1986, 11). Peg Brand and Paula Granger take note of the paucity of artistic representations of childbirth in the penultimate chapter of this collection. Sheila Lintott explores maternal experiences for evidence of the sublime in the hopes of contributing to contemporary attempts to demasculinize the concept of the sublime in chapter 15. In “The Aesthetics of Childbirth,” Brand and Granger begin their investigation with the observation that women are common subjects of visual art. Women are represented doing all sorts of things and often doing nothing at all, with one exception: women are not depicted giving birth. This observation reminds us again of the nineteenth-century photographic practice of “hidden mother” discussed at the beginning of this introduction. There, women were erased or hidden; here, Brand and Granger note that a significant way in which women contribute, literally, to human life is made less salient by being neglected by artists. Perhaps this has not always been the case; feminist artist Judy Chicago suggests that in more woman-centric cultures, birthing women were not deemed unfit subjects for artistic representation. Brand and Granger argue that there are at least three underlying factors that function to ensure that maternal representations will include pregnant and postpartum women, but not women in the throes of labor and birth. These are blatant sexism, a general fear of the body, intolerance for images of pain, and specific fear and intense suspicion of women’s power. Throughout their inquiry into the philosophy and politics of aesthetic representation, by punctuating it with numerous illustrative examples of works that buck the trend of hiding what feminist artist Judy Chicago calls “the moment of birth,” Brand and Granger are able to illustrate how reactions to various artistic representations can serve as cultural Rorschach tests to expose cultural fears, tensions, and obsessions. Ultimately, the authors suggest that as women have been removed from their roles as midwives and birth assistants, being displaced by male physicians and a masculinized medical establishment that has co-opted birth, women’s desire for representations of birth has increased. The result is a network of women sharing images of birth in order to educate and celebrate, from birthing videos appearing on YouTube to the personal sharing of realistic images of birth. In closing, Brand and Granger note that if women’s lives and women’s work weren’t assumed to be insignificant, we would expect genuine cultural celebrations of the serious and challenging process of giving birth. Sheila Lintott focuses on aesthetic aspects of the subjective experiences involved in gestating and giving birth to a child in the fifteenth and final chapter of this collection, “The Sublimity of Gestating and Giving Birth: Toward a Feminist Conception of the Sublime.” Lintott analyzes the complex experiences a woman has while pregnant and while giving birth in light of philosophical theories of the sublime. Her inquiry follows in the footsteps of many others that have disclosed the gendered nature of traditional conceptions of the sublime and how traditional, masculinist conceptions of the sublime are

Introduction 17 misleading and woefully mistaken. Whether it is Edmund Burke’s conception of the sublime as a delightful horror or Immanuel Kant’s notion of the sublime as that which in comparison to which all else is small or weak, Lintott’s reading of many maternal experiences as involving apprehension of and confrontations with ambiguity, immensity, terror, and intensity makes gestation and birth seem to be promising contenders for sublime experience. Given the associations the sublime with worthiness of respect and even awe, recovering the sublime and revising it in ways appropriate to both its nature and to women’s experiences is a feminist project. Moreover, articulating a feminist conception of the sublime, as Lintott does, exposes a sublimity that is less distanced, more visceral, and notably, less safe than those conceptions of the sublime that are decidedly, although perhaps not intentionally, masculinist. In the course of her analysis, Lintott also considers whether the maternal experiences on which she focuses might also be experiences of the abject or the beautiful. Of course, she maintains, they might be and often are. However, this is no reason to exclude the possibility—the very real possibility—that much of what a woman experiences during gestation and giving birth offers her a chance to experience the sublime and in so doing to grow in her awareness of her many impressive and profound capacities. Lintott’s chapter closes with an assertion that rethinking maternal experiences must involve rethinking a complex of basic concepts, commitments, and ideals. For her, the rethinking starts with maternal experiences and extends through notions of the sublime to related ideals of respect and strength.

NOTES 1. See “The Hidden Mother” on the weblog Accidental Mysteries by John Forester, original post Dec. 2008 (reposted Nov. 2010), accessed Jan. 5, 2011, http://accidentalmysteries.blogspot.com/2008/12/hidden-mother.html.

WORKS CITED Bombeck, Erma. 1993. “Mothers of Disabled Children.” Today, September 4. Accessed May 2010. http://knoahsarc.org/2010/05/06/how-god-choosesadisabled-child-for-a-mother-erma-bombeck/. Daly, Mary. 1978. Gyn/Ecology: The Meta-Ethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon. Firestone, Shulamith. 1970. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: Bantam. Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice. Boston: Harvard University Press. Noddings, Nel. 1984. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rich, Adrienne. 1976. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: W. W. Norton. Ruddick, Sara. 1989. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. New York: Ballantine.

Part I

Maternal Norms, Practices, and Insights

1

Sara Ruddick, Transracial Adoption, and the Goals of Maternal Practice Jean Keller

INTRODUCTION Sara Ruddick uses adoption as a guiding metaphor in her groundbreaking book, Maternal Thinking. She declares “all mothers are adoptive” as a way to convey her conviction that one becomes a mother by choosing to engage in the work of caring for children, rather than through the physical act of becoming pregnant and giving birth. Despite using this metaphor, Ruddick fails to consider actual adoptive maternal practice when constructing her theory. In this chapter, I explore what we can learn about mothering, both adoptive and biological, if we use actual adoption as the starting point for thinking about the goals that guide transracial adoptive maternal practice. In Maternal Thinking, Ruddick argues that successful mothering is the outcome of careful and deliberate maternal thinking and practice. She defi nes practices as collective human activities distinguished by the aims that identify them and by the consequent demands made on practitioners committed to those aims. The aims or goals that define a practice are so central or “constitutive” that in the absence of the goal you would not have that practice. (1989, 13–14; emphasis added) Ruddick then argues that preservative love, the protective work mothers engage in to ensure their children’s survival; fostering growth, the work done to nurture “a child’s developing spirit” including his or her “emotional, cognitive, sexual and social development” (1989, 82–83); and socialization for acceptance, “training a child to be the kind of person whom others accept and whom the mothers themselves can actively appreciate” (104) are three goals constitutive of maternal practice. Mothers pursue these goals to secure their children’s physical, emotional, and intellectual development and social well-being. The Korean adoption literature demonstrates that Ruddick’s three goals do not adequately capture the goals that guide transracial adoptive

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maternal practice. When Americans fi rst began adopting Korean War orphans fi fty years ago, they were told to treat their adopted Korean children as they would American birth children. In a society trying to be color-blind and in which closed adoptions were the norm, discussions of race, birth parents, and birth country/birth culture were avoided by wellmeaning adoptive parents. The adoption literature is rife with stories told by adult Korean and other transracial adoptees of the psychic costs that resulted from such well-meaning but misguided advice. These include feeling lonely and isolated when their loss and grief were left unacknowledged and unaddressed within their adoptive families and a sense of shame and/or alienation for being a racial/ethnic minority within a white family and white majority culture. Adult transracial adoptees also report that their adoptive families often didn’t prepare them for the racism they would encounter and that they were left to address discrimination, and the damage it infl icts, on their own (Trenka 2005; Trenka, Oparah, and Shin 2006; Wilkinson and Fox 2002; Freundlich and Lieberthal 2000). As a result of these struggles, some adoptees report relationship difficulties and trust issues into adulthood. (Freundlich and Lieberthal 2000, 26; the adoptees surveyed in this study are a self-selected group and may not represent Korean adoptees overall). Thus, the Korean adoption literature suggests that adoptive parents who raise their minority children only with the goals elucidated by Sara Ruddick in mind endanger their children’s well-being. Moreover, adoptees who struggle with feelings of shame, selfacceptance, isolation, and grief without familial or social support are not well equipped to achieve the personal growth that Ruddick sees as fundamental to maternal practice. I have previously argued that three types of goals are constitutive of maternal practice (2010). Each is evident in transracial adoptive maternal practice: 1. Some maternal goals are universal but are interpreted in culturally specific ways. Teaching transracial adoptees to anticipate and deal with racism as a means to ensure their survival is an example of this type of goal. It is a culturally specific manifestation of Ruddick’s goal of preservative love. 2. Some goals are universal but only become reflective and intentional, and hence visible, for some groups of mothers. The goals of kinning and helping transracial adoptees develop their racial-ethnic identity are examples. 3. A third set of goals are specific only to some mothers. Consider, for example, adoptive parents’ efforts to help their children deal with adoption related grief and loss. In this chapter I will discuss two examples of the second type of goal, namely, kinning and helping children cultivate their racial-ethnic identity. Striving

Goals of Maternal Practice 23 for these ends requires explicitly strategizing about aspects of motherhood that most mothers take for granted. They require that transracially adoptive parents be ready to become a different kind of person and to create and follow a new model of the family. Yet if the following goals are constitutive of and thus necessary for successful transracial adoptive maternal practice, then prospective adoptive parents who cannot commit themselves to these goals and to the personal and familial transformation they require should reconsider whether transracial adoption is appropriate for them.

KINNING: THE CREATION OF FAMILY AND CULTIVATION OF FAMILY IDENTITY The fi rst goal of adoptive maternal practice is kinning, the work of creating family. Signe Howell describes the process of kinning as typically beginning when adoptive parents begin to share with friends and family the referral photo of their new child and continues as parents legally change their child’s name, get a new birth certificate, and sign the formal adoption papers (Howell 2006, 63–64). This primarily legal dimension of kinning creates the scaffolding for the dimension I’m most concerned with, helping the child develop a strong sense of herself as a unique and irreplaceable member of this family. Family identity is created daily through the work of taking care of the child’s physical, emotional, social, and psychological needs. By learning that she can trust these people to take care of her and tend to her personal needs, the child learns that these are her people, her family. Confidence in her family relations creates a safe place to work through her feelings of loss and abandonment; the cultivation of trust and attachment within the family also makes it possible to establish loving and trusting relationships throughout life. Through physical caretaking, adoptive families sometimes go to enormous lengths to cultivate attachment, trust, and a strong sense of family. For example, some parents engage in the “baby wearing” and family bed practices favored by attachment parenting guru Dr. Sears to provide children with ongoing physical reminders of family presence. This emergent family identity, cultivated through physical caretaking, is often supported and reinforced through family stories. Both biological and adoptive families use storytelling as one strategy to help their children know who they are and where they come from. Parents help children fi nd their place in the family, and so fi nd one small and secure corner of the world, by looking for family resemblances. Sometimes these family relations are biological, for example, looking to see who inherited Grandpa’s prodigious nose. Other times they focus more on social attributes, such as tracing a family lineage of assertive women back through the generations. Philosopher Charlotte Witt describes family resemblances as “part of a family’s mythology”; they don’t capture facts about the world

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but are observations interpreted to a given end. She describes them as serving “several purposes: bonding family members, explaining behavior, assigning blame” (2005, 139). Stories tracing family resemblances are also strategies to achieve the maternal goal of kinning—to reinforce children’s adoptive family membership by integrating them into extended family networks, while helping them make sense of their biological families and its relation to their adoptive family. Within adoptive families, the strategy of telling attachment-inducing and identity-conferring stories is typically more conscious, explicit, and intentional than in biological families. Transracially adoptive families in communities where mixed-race families are rare cannot presume their family connection will always be evident to their children or the broader society. (I’m thinking of such commonly asked questions as, “Are they ‘real’ brother and sister?”) They must intentionally make this connection and be prepared to explain it to others, thereby actively constructing their family identity.1 Adoptive parents create a narrative structure that explains to their children who “their” people (adoptive and biological) are. Thus, the work of kinning isn’t restricted to creating strong adoptive family bonds. Adoptive families also work to help their children make sense of their relation to their birth families. Here I focus on this work within the international adoption context; this work would surely look different within the context of open domestic adoption. Large portions of the pre-adoption stories of internationally adopted children remain unknown. This is particularly true for children adopted from China. From fragments, adoptive parents engage in the work of narrative repair, 2 trying to help their children make sense of the events that led to their placement. Parents may try to explain the decision to relinquish them for adoption as a responsible and loving act, not the result of children’s misbehavior or inherent unlovability. Parental narratives can serve as a kind of counterstory to the societal image of the irresponsible, uneducated mother from an undeveloped country who abandons her child. And they can reject the trope that adoptees owe a debt of gratitude to the adoptive parents and adoptive country. Through counterstories, parents try to inoculate their children from the harm done by such culturally dominant adoption narratives. They can lay the groundwork for understanding their birth mothers, rather than feeling anger or embarrassment; valuing and appreciating their birth countries rather than feeling shame or ignorance; and mutual love and respect between adoptive parents and adoptees versus adoptee gratitude for a nonrepayable debt. Through counterstories, adoptive parents try to provide their children the necessary tools for achieving a positive understanding of their adoption stories and for constructing positive self-identities. Research supports the value of such maternal work: adoptees with more positive views of adoption have higher levels of self-acceptance, self-esteem, and more positive relationships (Basow et al. 2008, 478).

Goals of Maternal Practice 25 This reflective and intentional form of narrative is fraught with ethical risk. It’s easy for adoptive parents, in framing the outlines of their child’s adoption story, to construct it in self-serving ways—for example, to highlight the dysfunction of the birth family, the neediness of the child, and the virtues of the adoptive parents. Alternately, adoptive parents may create such a distorted sense of the birth parents, either by overromanticizing or by denigrating them, that the family adoption story makes eventual reconciliation with the birth family near impossible. Parents may also tell the family story in such a way that it emphasizes the parents’ joy at adoption while minimizing the loss and grief or other complex feelings of the adoptee. These cautionary tales illustrate that adoptive parents must exercise caution in creating narratives and that they need to think carefully about the ethics of the stories they tell. It is easy for an adult to do more talking than listening, to interpret their children’s stories for them, making adoptees passive recipients of their own life stories (Honig 2005, 218). The tendency within philosophy in recent years has been to embrace a view of the self as socially constituted and to understand autonomy in relational terms. Yet if we’re still to meaningfully talk about self-identity, selfdefi nition, and personal autonomy, well-intentioned parents must provide a narrative framework that will help their children make sense of the various pieces of their life story, while still leaving room for them to construct their own identities; otherwise, parents take on a project that rightly belongs to their children, and autonomy is undermined. The account of family identity I’ve articulated thus far emphasizes the importance of fostering family connection through detecting similarities and making connections among family members. For adoptive families in general, and transracial adoptive families in particular, it is just as important to acknowledge differences (Eldridge 1999, ch. 15; Howell 2006, 64). Ignoring obvious differences isolates children by making difference that is so evident and palpable to them unspeakable; familial silence suggests difference constitutes a threat to family unity or that there is something bad about the birth family (or the adoptee; see Eldridge 1999, 145, on this last point). Thus, stories must acknowledge and articulate both similarities and differences among family members. Social-scientific research supports this view, indicating that parents’ acceptance of their children’s differences correlates positively with children’s mental health, whereas both denial and overemphasis of difference is negatively correlated with mental health (Lee 2003, 724).

THE CULTIVATION OF RACIAL-ETHNIC IDENTITY3 The second goal of transracial adoptive maternal practice is concerned with helping transracially and transnationally adopted children develop a positive sense of racial-ethnic identity, one that integrates aspects of their birth

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and adoptive cultures. Developing a positive sense of racial-ethnic identity is already difficult for children of color in a still racist society. It is especially challenging for children of color raised in predominantly white communities with limited exposure to people of their heritage and who may be raised by white parents who have not thought deeply or well about issues of race and identity or may harbor racist views themselves. In her essay “Locating Traitorous Identities: Toward a View of PrivilegeCognizant White Character,” Alison Bailey describes race, like gender, as being performed in accordance with socially constructed scripts, as being contingently connected with physical bodies, and as being internalized at an early age (1998, 34). The challenge for transracial adoptees is that they typically don’t know what scripts to perform, as within their families they’ve only rehearsed white scripts and they may have only witnessed two-dimensional and distorted media representations of persons of their own race or ethnicity. In a highly racialized society like ours, this becomes problematic: children of color who identify with and feel most at home with “white” people, culture, and values—who identify as white or with white norms—are unlikely, once they become adults and venture forth on their own, to be embraced as white by whites.4 Likewise, Asian, African, and Latino communities may fi nd perplexing, if not unintelligible, persons who look like they should belong, but who don’t know appropriate forms of eye contact or physical distance between bodies, don’t know the traditions, don’t speak the language, don’t like the food—in short—who don’t know the culture. Thus, transracial adoptees often struggle to fi nd a community in which they can feel at home.5 Given that self-identity arises in the interaction between an individual’s sense of self and how others perceive and respond to that self, it is highly desirable that adoptees of color find or create a community that will grant them intersubjective recognition to help solidify their identity. For members of racial minority groups, this identity includes their sense of racial-ethnic identity (Basow et al. 2008, 474). As transracial adoptee and multicultural educator John Raible points out, “transracial adoptees will live adult lives self-identifying as people of color in a race-conscious, sometimes hostile society” (2006, 183). Thus it is imperative that transracial adoptees fi nd their place in the relevant communities of color, in addition to the white families and communities of which they have been a part. They need to forge a racial-ethnic self-identity that makes sense to them and is intelligible to others. The social scientific data on ethnic identity confi rms that a positive sense of racial-ethnic identity is important for well-being and personal growth. Specifically, Korean adoptees who score higher on Phinney’s Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (Phinney 1992) also score higher with regard to personal growth and self-acceptance (Basow et al. 2008, 478). Yoo and Lee cite their previous studies that indicate “positive ethnic identity is associated with higher self-esteem, sense of community, and social connectedness in samples of Asian American college students” (Yoo and Lee 2008,

Goals of Maternal Practice 27 64; Lee 2003; Lee and Yoo 2004; Tsai, Ying, and Lee 2001). These data support my claim that fostering racial-ethnic identity is a constitutive goal of transracial adoptive maternal practice. Transracially adoptive parents must provide their children with experiences and opportunities to help them explore their racial-ethnic identity and to help them engage relevant communities of color. Such opportunities help transracial adoptees with their psychological adjustment (Lee 2003, 720), and they also foster identity development and personal growth by making it possible to eventually engage in self-defi nition related to racial-ethnic identity. As with cultivating familial identity, all parents help to cultivate a child’s racial-ethnic identity, although this process becomes more explicit and intentional for transracial families, both adoptive and nonadoptive (Lee, Grotevant, et al. 2006, 572). We’re all steeped in our racial-ethnic identities, and we convey them to our children incessantly in how loudly, softly, quickly, or slowly we speak; in the stories we share from our childhood; in honoring the voice of the individual or the collective; or in the relative degree of privilege and sense of social belonging we convey to our children. Indeed, it’s important that we convey racial-ethnic identity, both because ethnic differences add to the diversity and interest of our society and because in our racially fi xated society, our children need a racial-ethnic identity to be intelligible to others and themselves. Racial-ethnic identity becomes more complicated in cases of transracial and transnational adoption, however. For example, most people have a hard time placing a fullblooded Korean woman who identifies and presents herself as Norwegian. The lack of intersubjective recognition for her sense of racial-ethnic identity can threaten her sense of self. It can also be the basis for self-loathing as she judges her own appearance and, with that, her self as deficient for lacking the blonde hair, blue eyes, and willowy height of a Norwegian.6 In the wake of adult adoptees’ criticisms of white parents who raised their children of color just as they would their birth children, various reflective and intentional strategies have been employed by adoptive parents to help their children develop a sense of racial-ethnic literacy, pride, and identity more in keeping with their external appearances and cultural heritages. For example, parents have organized weeklong culture camps such as Minnesota’s Kamp Kimchee and created cultural groups such as Families with Children from China, which sponsors a wide array of playgroups and cultural activities. In these ways, parents try to ensure that transnational adoptees will grow up with some experience of their birth cultures, knowledge of the social significance of race and the persistence of racism, and friendships with other transracial adoptive families. Likewise, parents may integrate food from their children’s birth countries into their culinary repertoire, read folktales and other stories about their children’s birth countries, integrate new celebrations into their family’s traditions, expand their family music or art collection in culturally appropriate ways, and study their children’s birth languages with their children. In these ways parents

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try to weave into their children’s daily lives and early, cherished memories fi rsthand experience and knowledge of key aspects of their racial-ethnic heritages. By helping their children develop deep-rooted connections to at least some aspects of their heritage, they hope the child will take pride in it and integrate some aspects of it into their evolving sense of personal and ethnic identity. In addition, parents hope this will make it easier for adoptees to make connections to, say, other Korean Americans and the KoreanAmerican community, both as a way to support their ethnic identity and because it is within such communities that individuals can access support for dealing with racism. As these examples demonstrate, the fi rst two goals of transracial adoptive maternal practice are interconnected; the family identity described in goal 1 includes a racial-ethnic dimension. Indeed, transracial adoptees maintain that goal 2 backfi res when conceived in isolation. That is, adoptees report feeling pressured or singled out when their racial-ethnic identity is always the one that is emphasized within the family, whereas the racialidentity of white members of the family goes by unmarked and unnoticed. Instead, they suggest that the family needs to be reconceived as a multicultural family (Freundlich and Lieberthal 2000). I understand this suggestion to imply that parents must be explicit about the racial-ethnic identities of the family’s white members and that when, for example, an adoptive family eats Chinese food, learns Chinese, or celebrates Chinese holidays, they do so because China and Chinese culture is seen as important for all members of the family. Finally, a multicultural family is one that includes persons of different racial-ethnic backgrounds in its circle of close friends and neighbors and that includes racially-ethnically diverse locations among its most frequented familial locations. John Raible describes the white family members of such a multicultural family, who have also integrated antiracism into their understanding of the world, as transracialized. He sees this transracialization process as necessary for successful transracial adoptions (Raible 2005a, 2005b, nd.a.). But what kind of racial-ethnic identity are adoptive parents trying to foster in their children? Few adult Korean adoptees identify as Korean American; they see that identity as too bound up with a Confucian worldview that feels alien and is especially difficult because most Korean adoptees don’t speak Korean. Some Korean adoptees identify more with the third generation of Korean Americans because, like them, they’re more Americanized and often don’t speak Korean. For others, the answer is simply being Asian American, because this is such a capacious category that includes people of widely divergent backgrounds. As Korean adoptees come of age, they increasingly seem to identify as Korean adoptees (Mark Hagland 2007; Sloth 2001, pg. 30 as quoted in Kim 2005 60 and 75). For within the Korean adoptee community, it’s understood that being Norwegian AND Korean isn’t incomprehensible. Thus, faced with a society that often makes them choose between aspects of their identity, Korean

Goals of Maternal Practice 29 adoptees have increasingly engaged in self-defi nition by creating their own communities of recognition, through tools like the Internet and groups like the Gathering (a reunion of adult Korean adoptees that has occurred biannually since 1999). And there’s evidence that other adoptee groups are viewing them as role models. Just as there are ethical risks associated with fostering family identity, so too are there risks associated with intentionally fostering within one’s child a sense of racial-ethnic identity different from one’s own— ethical risks that go beyond the obvious practical difficulty of trying to provide a child with the tools necessary to form an identity that one does not share. Because Korean adoptees’ birth families didn’t emigrate with them, it makes sense that adoptees, even more so than children of Korean immigrants, need to know about Korea if they are to understand their heritage or reconnect with birth family (Hagland 2007). Yet there is a real danger of well-meaning adoptive parents teaching their children an overly romanticized or “folkloric” view of Korea.7 Not only is the romanticized view sanitized of what for Korean adoptees are unsavory aspects of Korean culture (for example, its insistence on the maintenance of paternal bloodline, which is the main reason why so many Korean children are made available for international adoption), but it’s also static—depicting “Korean-ness” and Korean culture as rooted fi rmly in the past. Upon returning to Korea, many adult adoptees report experiences of alienation, secondary status, rejection, and discrimination—particularly when it becomes evident that they don’t speak the language (Kim 2005, 67). Thus, being raised with an overly romanticized, sanitized, or static view of Korean society can make it difficult to understand and relate to contemporary, highly industrialized, rapidly changing, urban Korea/ Koreans. It may also lead adoptees to have unrealistic expectations for the reception they’ll receive in their birth country, setting them up for feelings of rejection and abandonment all over again. A number of critics raise a related concern, namely, that the “culture” to which adoptive parents expose their children is often superfi cial, lacking historical depth and real cultural insight. Rather, it is too often a view of culture that can be commodified and purchased in the marketplace in the form of dolls, books, games, and other souvenirs (Kasintz 2007; Howell 2006, 79). Moreover, parents may be eager to attend ethnic celebrations but be reluctant to address more difficult aspects of racial-ethnic identity, such as the history and present-day experiences of racial discrimination experienced by members of their children’s racialethnic group. To avoid these pitfalls, adult adoptees suggest that adoptive parents should try to provide their children with unmediated, direct access to their birth culture, persons of their racial-ethnic background, or both. This can take many forms, from moving to a racially mixed neighborhood or enrolling children in a diverse school, to fi nding cultural mentors for their

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children, or to taking homeland tours. It is in negotiating the sometimes rich and sometimes painful messiness of actual encounters with members of their racial-ethnic group that adoptees will be better able to address such questions as What does it mean for me to be a Korean-American adoptee in the United States today? What is my relation to Korea, to Korean Americans, to Koreans, to Caucasian Americans, to other Asians? Who am I and where do I fit in? As shown here, kinning and the cultivation of racial and ethnic identity are mutually constitutive goals. Kinning emphasizes the importance of establishing connections and similarities between adoptive families and adoptees, whereas the racial-ethnic identity goal insists that these connections also acknowledge and cultivate secure sense of identity for the transracial adoptee. A secure identity is both valuable in itself and makes possible Ruddick’s goal of personal growth.

CONCLUSION The goals of transracial adoptive maternal practice discussed in this chapter, particularly when considered together with the two additional goals of training children to anticipate and respond to racism and helping children recognize and address adoption related grief and loss, require significant self-examination and transformation to be carried out well. The adoptive family must become more intentional about creating family bonds, and white adoptive families must be willing to take the steps necessary to become transracialized. To achieve this latter goal, white transracially adoptive parents must go beyond purchasing the accoutrements of racialethnic diversity when supporting their children’s racial-ethnic identity; they must actually integrate their family life, both by intentionally cultivating long-term mutually caring relationships that cross racial-ethnic lines and by critically interrogating the racism and white privilege that still permeate our society and that typically remain invisible to whites in a white dominant society (Raible 2005a, 2005b, n.d.a.). Such self-transformation is incredibly hard work; it’s no easy matter to rethink one’s fundamental and flawed presuppositions about the world, such as that racism is largely an issue of the past. Yet adoptive parents have the best motivator there is for engaging in such difficult work—love for the delightful and challenging creatures that are their children. Recent research suggests that transracially adoptive parents increasingly acknowledge the need to cultivate racial-ethnic identity and to prepare children to live in a still racist society. In his 2006 essay, Richard Lee reports that, as compared with studies of transracially adoptive parents in the 1980s, parents in his study were less likely to be color-blind and were, as a result, more likely to engage in culturalization and racialization. These parenting practices, in turn, contributed to adoptees’ ethnic identity and well-being (578).

Goals of Maternal Practice 31 It should now be clear that adults who choose to engage in transracial adoption should be ready to become different people and to create a different, multicultural, transracialized family. Whereas self-transformation is, I suspect, part and parcel of any good maternal practice—for example, Ruddick describes the self-doubt, questioning, and intellectual development that are part of maternal practice generally (1989, 94, 194–96)— the demands of transracial adoptive maternal practice are typically greater than in same race biological families and thus, presumably, the self-transformation is commensurately greater. Highlighting the self-transformation necessary to engage in successful transracial adoptive mothering suggests that the goals guiding maternal practice are not simply child centered8 but are also relational. That is, securing the identity and well-being of one’s children can require significant transformation of the mother herself. Thus, by taking seriously Ruddick’s adoption metaphor, we have been able to not only add to Ruddick’s list of maternal goals but also to see that her conception of maternal goals must be reconceived to accommodate a more relational view. NOTES 1. Such questions about whether various family members belong together also arise in mixed-race biological families. In these cases, the family relationship may need to be explained to outsiders but presumably is self-evident to the children. 2. This concept originally comes from Hilde Lindemann Nelson (2001, 20). She also introduces the concept of the “counterstory.” 3. Adequate consideration of racial-ethnic identity requires reflection on the goal of training children to anticipate and respond to racism. Otherwise, the racial-ethnic identity goal may appear to advocate a simplistic view of multiculturalism that is oblivious to the inequalities of power that continue to attach to racial difference. Due to space constraints, I cannot address the racism goal here; however, its importance cannot be overemphasized. 4. In their study of Korean adoptees who attend the fi rst Gathering in 1999, Freundlich and Lieberthal report that 36% of attendees viewed themselves as Caucasian when they were children whereas only 11% viewed themselves as Caucasian when they were adults. For many adoptees, going away from home, as when they go to college, is their fi rst significant and sustained experience of being treated as nonwhite. It is partly due to these experiences that ethnic identification often changes from Caucasian to Korean or Asian when adoptees enter college (see Freundlich and Lieberthal 2000). Other relevant factors are increased access to Asian Americans and Asian-American culture through coursework and student events. 5. This challenge, of course, isn’t limited to transracial adoptees. Maria Lugones eloquently speaks on this point in her discussion of home and fragmented identities in her book Pilgramages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. 6. Korean adoptee and writer Mark Hagland observes that every adult Korean adoptee he knows has issues with body image. He suggests this stems from a combination of racist depictions of Asians in the media and the disjunct

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Jean Keller between self-image and the view in the mirror (2007). This claim is partially supported by the social scientific literature. Richard Lee (2003, 718) refers to a research study on Asian-American and African-American transracial adoptees by Brooks and Barth (1999). This study reports that about half of their 244 research subjects experienced discomfort with their racial appearances despite the fact that all of them had secure or strong racial-ethnic identities. Presumably, transracial adoptees without a strong racial-ethnic identity would experience even more discomfort. 7. Eleana Kim (2005, 50) raises this concern—but with regard to the Korean government presenting this view to returning adult Korean adoptees; see also Howell (2006, 80). 8. See discussion of child-centered goals in Keller (2010).

WORKS CITED Bailey, Alison. 1998. “Locating Traitorous Identities: Toward a View of PrivilegeCognizant White Character.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 13.3: 27–42. Basow, Susan, Elizabeth Lilley, Jamila Bookwala, and Ann McGillicuddy-DeLisi. 2008. “Identity Development and Psychological Well-Being in Korean-Born Adoptees in the U.S.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 78.4: 473–80. Brooks, D., and R. P. Barth. 1999. “Adult Transracial and Inracial Adoptees: Effects of Race, Gender, Adoptive Family Structure, and Placement History on Adjustment Outcomes.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 69:87–99. Eldridge, Sherrie. 1999. Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew. New York: Random House. Freundlich, Madelyn, and Joy Kim Lieberthal. 2000. “The Gathering of the First Generation of Adult Korean Adoptees: Adoptees’ Perceptions of International Adoption.” Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute. Accessed May 4, 2007. http://www.adoptioninstitute.org/proed/korfi ndings.html. Hagland, Mark. 2007. “The Top Ten Things Your Adopted Child (of Any Age) Is Thinking but Will Never Tell You.” Presentation at the Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network (KAAN), July 22. Haslanger, Sally, and Charlotte Witt. 2006. Adoption Matters: Philosophical and Feminist Essays. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Honig, Elizabeth Alice. 2005. “Phantom Lives, Narratives of Possibility.” In Cultures of Transnational Adoption, ed. Toby Alice Volkman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Howell, Signe. 2006. The Kinning of Foreigners: Transnational Adoption in a Global Perspective. New York: Berghahn. Kasintz, Philip. 2007. “Thoughts on My ‘Home(land) Décor.’” Qualitiative Sociology 30:221–24. Keller, Jean. 2010. “Rethinking Ruddick and the Ethnocentrism Critique of Maternal Thinking.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 25.4: 834–51. Kim, Eleana. 2005. “Wedding Citizenship and Culture: Korean Adoptees and the Global Family of Korea.” In Cultures of Transnational Adoption, ed. Toby Alice Volkman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lee, Richard. 2003. “The Transracial Adoption Paradox: History, Research, and Counseling Implications of Cultural Socialization.” Counseling Psychologist 31.6: 711–44. Lee, Richard, Harold Grotevant, Wendy Hellerstedt, Megan Gunnar, and Minnesota Adoption Project Team. 2006. “Cultural Socialization in Families

Goals of Maternal Practice 33 with Internationally Adopted Children.” Journal of Family Psychology 20.4: 571–80. Lee, Richard, and Hyung Chol Yoo. 2004. “Structure and Measurement of Ethnic Identity for Asian Americans.” Journal of Counseling Psychology 51:263–69. Lugones, Maria. 2003. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Nelson, Hilde Lindemann. 2001. Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Phinney, J. 1992. “The Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure: A New Scale for Use with Adolescents and Young Adults from Diverse Groups.” Journal of Adolescent Research 7:156–76. Raible, John. 2005a. “9 Steps to a Transracialized, Multicultural Lifestyle.” Accessed May 27, 2010. http://johnraible.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/oct_2005_ newsletter.pdf. . 2005b. “Conclusion to My Dissertation from Sharing the Spotlight: The Non-Adopted Siblings of Transracial Adoptees.” University of Massachusetts–Amherst. Accessed May 27, 2010. http://johnraible.wordpress.com/aconversation-10-years-later-the-movie/conclusion-to-my-dissertation/. . n.d.a. “What Is Transracialization?” Accessed May 27, 2010. http://johnraible.wordpress.com/about-john-w-raible/what-is-transracialization/. Raible, John. 2006. “Lifelong Impact, Enduring Need.” In Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, ed. Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin. Cambridge, MA: South End. Ruddick, Sara. 1989. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon. Tsai, J. L., Y. Ying, and P. A. Lee. 2001. “Cultural Predictors of Self-Esteem: A Study of Chinese America Female and Male Young Adults.” Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 7:284–97. Trenka, Jane Jeong. 2005. The Language of Blood. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf. Trenka, Jane Jeong, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin, eds. 2006. Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption. Cambridge, MA: South End. Wilkinson, Sook, and Nancy Fox, eds. 2002. After the Morning Calm: Refl ections of Korean Adoptees. Detroit, MI: Sunrise Ventures. Witt, Charlotte. 2005. “Family Resemblances: Adoption, Personal Identity, and Genetic Essentialism.” In Adoption Matters: Philosophical and Feminist Essays, ed. Sally Haslanger and Charlotte Witt. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Yoo, Hyung Choi, and Richard Lee. 2008. “Does Ethnic Identity Buffer or Exacerbate the Effects of Frequent Racial Discrimination on Situational Well-Being of Asian Americans?” Journal of Counseling Psychology 55.1: 63–74

2

Where Did I Go? The Invisible Postpartum Mother Jennifer Benson and Allison Wolf

INTRODUCTION Pregnant bodies are often obvious bodies. However, the postpartum woman is far less visible. This is true when a postpartum woman walks down the street, and it is especially true if one hunts for her in the pages of pregnancy and childbirth manuals. Our principle contention is that the childbirth and pregnancy lay literature, which aims to promote women’s knowledge and skills for self-care and infant care, actually extends the oppression of women by erasing the “fourth trimester.” In the winter of 2007, both authors of this chapter became pregnant. We were also both professional philosophers interested in feminism and bioethics. As trained researchers, we turned our academic skills to the task of understanding the biological, emotional, and cultural meanings of pregnancy. The resources at our disposal were extensive: classes on childbirth and newborn care, practitioners who scheduled regular half-hour prenatal checkups, and an extensive popular literature with the expressed goal of helping women to be informed participants in their own care. We used all of these resources and more. In each case our goal was to understand pregnancy and childbirth such that we could make informed decisions about our own care and the health of our babies. The available lay literature and childbirth education classes are certainly a boon to pregnant women who have the time and money to learn about their bodies and their babies. However, even if one can access these learning materials, there are frustrating and disturbing gaps in the literature. The most signifi cant of these is the neglected fi rst months after birth, sometimes called the fourth trimester.1 For the mother, the postpartum period is fraught with emotional, physical, and practical challenges. Yet these issues are minimally acknowledged or simply ignored by the childbirth literature. This lack of information refl ects and contributes to women’s oppression because it supports a pattern of carefully minding the mother’s needs only until the baby is born, at which point the focus is fi rmly shifted to the infant and the mother is at best of secondary importance.

Where Did I Go? 35 This chapter is intended to identify these silences in the literature and the consequences for postpartum women. We fi rst describe the specific form of pregnancy and childbirth literature that is the target of our criticism. Following this, we clarify the concept of oppression, especially as it is used by feminists. In the third section, we demonstrate the preponderance of information about pregnancy, birth, and newborn care as contrasted with the superficial and absent treatment of the fourth trimester. Finally, we show that the limited information about the postpartum period joined with heteronormative domestic advice in the childbirth manuals serves as a key dimension in the oppression of women, specifically, biological mothers.

THE LAY LITERATURE AND THE AIM TO INFORM The lay literature on pregnancy, birth, and newborn care is extensive and readily available in brick-and-mortar bookstores and through online distributors. In the national chain bookstores, one can expect to find several shelves dedicated to such books. Online book dealers offer lists that go on for pages. There are books for those who seek the sassy pregnancy; the fashionable pregnancy; the exercise-rich pregnancy; the most nutritionally sound pregnancy; the dude’s guide to pregnancy; and the no-nonsense manual explaining gestation, birth, and new parenthood. In our analysis we restrict our focus to this last type of book.2 Although the main focus of these books is a biomedically oriented chronological account of pregnancy and delivery, it is reasonable to expect that these guides would treat the mother’s postpartum experience because they address the baby’s first breaths and early infant care, often extending explanations well through the fi rst six weeks after birth. All of the books we examined have the stated goal of providing expectant mothers with a comprehensive guide to the medical, emotional, and practical challenges of pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period. Of course, the texts differ in tone and style. Some are written by doctors who offer the voice of medical authority and provide accessible explanations replete with medical terminology.3 Others are less technical and occasionally humorous, although they still aim to provide accurate explanations for readers.4 Some offer extensive full-color illustrations in conjunction with frank and approachable descriptions. 5 Yet in all of these books, the introductory remarks offer a goal that is remarkably similar. The authors aim to help readers become knowledgeable about their bodies and their babies. Such knowledge, it is supposed, will help expectant parents to be less anxious (Murkhuff and Mazel 2008, xxiii; Jones and Jones 2004, xiii) and have a realistic understanding of gestation, birth, and early parenthood. The introductory remarks of some authors specifically declare the goal of providing a comprehensive guide that answers likely and unlikely questions with more information, not less (Jones and Jones 2004, xiii; Regan 2005, 7; Stone and Eddleman 2003, 7). In all the books under analysis, the texts

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provide week-by-week explanations of fetal development, the wide range of side effects and changes women may experience, the risks and benefits associated with potential procedures, an extensive explanation of the birth process, and detailed explanations of the infant’s adjustment to the world outside the womb. Thus it is clear that the aim to inform represents the general goal of the pregnancy lay literature on the market today.

OPPRESSION Our thesis is that the erasure of postpartum women from the childbirth literature advances women’s oppression. To demonstrate this, we must fi rst explain oppression and its operation. Marilyn Frye has argued that oppression refers to the structural phenomenon wherein a group of individuals, marked by some range of identifiable characteristics, is systematically caged by barriers that reduce their options and mobility while simultaneously leaving others comparatively free to pursue their choices. These networks of forces and barriers are not “accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as so catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction” (Frye 1983, 4). The experience of encountering oppressive barriers is typically exemplified by the problem of a double bind. A double bind is a situation in which one’s options are narrowly defined and all the remaining choices are accompanied by detrimental consequences (Frye 1983, 2). Of course, everyone experiences a range of double binds. Consider a person with a strong gag reflex who needs to take medication in pill form. The consequence of not taking the medication includes substantially painful symptoms. The consequence of taking the pill is a series of near swallows and repeated gagging, where each incident results in a progressively nastier tasting pill—and the likely embarrassment should anyone else see the whole production. Both options are far from ideal, yet one must make a choice. This is the nature of the double bind. Whereas mundane double binds are features of normal life for all of us, if one is a member of an oppressed group, the oppressive double binds are arranged into barriers that cage. The consequence of a nonoppressive double bind is temporary inconvenience, and in some cases perhaps continued motion. Frye notes that traffic laws limit one’s behavior and create a double bind if one is late or caught behind a slow vehicle; yet the restriction ultimately insures continued motion in the form of orderly travel (Frye 1983, 11). Oppressive double binds are encountered because one is a member of a particular group, and they function in conjunction with other networks of double binds to limit one’s overall mobility. When members of an oppressed group try to move in any direction, they face barriers that make motion more difficult. It is as if they are trapped in a cage.

Where Did I Go? 37 Suppose a breastfeeding mother works in a field where females are in a significant minority, and the men around her bond and strengthen their work relationships by making degrading remarks and sexual jokes about women. The fact that she is breastfeeding and takes breaks to pump during the day has become a recent topic in their conversations. This is a form of workplace sexual harassment, and she wonders whether or not she should report the treatment to the human resources department. If she reports the problem, she may be interpreted as a troublemaker; if she attempts to ignore the behavior, she risks being perceived as accepting or inviting yet more mistreatment. Meanwhile, this double bind works in conjunction with other social barriers, such as the fact that women earn less on the dollar than men, women are more likely to be sexually assaulted than men, women are expected to prioritize their children (especially infants) over career interests, and so on. Meanwhile, the barriers that she and others who are similarly situated experience as caging may simultaneously allow the oppressors to pursue their life goals more easily. The men she works with use degrading remarks and jokes about women in order to build trust relationships, to mark out “their kind of coworker,” and even to determine who should rise through the ranks of leadership. Women caught within this kind of network of forces don’t experience workplace harassment as a single awkward incident. They experience the harassment as a double bind that operates in conjunction with other double binds to limit women’s mobility. This does not mean that members of oppressed groups are incapable of choice or action. It means that the oppressed fi nd their choices and range of actions restricted because of the network of barriers surrounding their every move. Although civil rights movements and the structural explanation of oppression have helped to make social, political, and economic oppression more visible, Bartky notes that the internal psychological dimensions of domination are also crucial to understanding the phenomenon of oppression (Bartky 1990, 22). Oppression conditions one’s self-perception and one’s conception of what’s possible as viable choices or life goals. The encounters with so many limitations and restricted forms of mobility encourage the oppressed to see themselves as inherently inferior, and perhaps even as the cause of their own suffering. This, of course, subverts the likelihood that the oppressed might recognize that the structural barriers arrayed against them are actually positioned by and for the benefit of the oppressors. According to Bartky, to be psychologically oppressed is to be weighed down in your mind; it is to have a harsh dominion exercised over your self-esteem. . . . Psychological oppression can be regarded as the “internalization of intimations of inferiority.” Like economic oppression, psychological oppression is institutionalized and systematic; it serves to make the work of domination easier by breaking the spirit of the dominated and

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Jennifer Benson and Allison Wolf by rendering them incapable of understanding the nature of those agencies responsible for their subjugation. (1990, 22–23)

Ultimately, psychological oppression leads the oppressed to feel that her oppression is natural, her own fault, and what she justly deserves. Consequently, she participates in her own oppression or sees it as unproblematic. Bartky, following Frantz Fanon, explores the major ways that psychological oppression is maintained. One mode of psychological oppression, the most instructive for this chapter, operates through the cultural symbols, ways of life, and ideological world views that manifest in culture and function to maintain the interests of dominant groups. Fanon notes the operation of such cultural domination as a component in racial oppression, and Bartky extends his analysis to examine how cultural domination operates in sexist oppression (1990, 23). For our purposes, we note cultural assumptions about the naturalness of mothering. The cultural assumptions about the virtues of a self-sacrificing mother, as well as symbols and ways of life that reinforce this norm, function to alter a mother’s self-understanding. These shape how a mother understands her identity and evaluates her choices. If she finds some aspect of infant care especially difficult, breastfeeding for example, the socially constructed demand for sacrifice makes her struggle into a personal quality, a personal failure as a mother. By contrast, if she fi nds success and satisfaction in breastfeeding her infant, this is evidence that women are naturally and inevitable nurturing. If one’s experience is at odds with the dominant cultural assumptions, symbols, and worldview, then one has no referent by which to make sense of one’s experience and identity. Bartky explains that the psychologically oppressed experience the “lack of a viable identity. Frequently [they] are unable to make sense of [their] own impulses or feelings . . . because [they] are forced to fi nd [their] way in a world which presents itself to [them] in a masked and deceptive fashion” (1990, 31). Moreover, these cultural values are disguised as natural. Faced with cultural symbols and narratives of mothers as self-sacrificing and breastfeeding as an archetypal image of mothering, a mother’s choice to prioritize her own health is interpreted as unnaturalness. In this manner it becomes difficult for a mother struggling with breastfeeding to see her desire to wean (or the infants self-weaning) as anything but failure, even if she has carefully thought about her health, the infant’s health, and the merits of switching to formula. Based on Frye’s and Bartky’s accounts of oppression, we see that oppression is both a large-scale social phenomenon and a phenomenon of psychological colonization. At a macro level, we see that oppression operates as a system of barriers, often experienced as networks of double binds that function together, limiting the mobility of the oppressed. At the level of psychological experience, oppression generates a truncated self-understanding. Thus, it becomes difficult to see what should be possible for an otherwise capable human being. Further, the origins of such manipulation

Where Did I Go? 39 and truncation are masked so that one has great difficulty seeing the source of the oppressive psychological conditioning.

THE FOURTH TRIMESTER We argue that the advice given to postpartum women by the lay literature on pregnancy and childbirth sustains and advances women’s oppression as a structural and psychological phenomenon. In order to see how this happens, we now turn to a treatment of the postpartum period in the lay literature. All the texts under consideration here offer sections or chapters that address the postpartum period.6 In examining these postpartum sections we asked the following questions: What is covered in these chapters? How does the amount of content and level of detail addressing the mother’s recovery compare with discussions of pregnancy and newborn care? As a result of the author’s content choices, what is obscured from the reader’s view, and what is prioritized among the various concerns for postpartum women? In what ways could the lay literature provide better help to postpartum mothers? The fi rst problem we found is that postpartum mothers are erased from the popular childbirth literature through a series of content choices and rhetorical moves that deemphasize the postpartum experience and its challenges while emphasizing the needs of others, especially the infant and the woman’s partner. Beyond this, the lay literature on pregnancy and childbirth offers a treatment of the postpartum experience that reinforces the oppression of women by promoting sexist gender stereotypes, by placing postpartum women in double binds, and by mystifying and obfuscating (thereby perpetuating) the oppressive networks that actually surround postpartum women so that they appear natural and normal. The postpartum section of childbirth manuals constitutes only one segment of these larger texts. We found that the treatment of postpartum experience, including early infant care, constituted on average 20% of the total content. By itself, this percentage seems promising. However, if one isolates the pages that focus only on the mother’s recovery from birth, especially pages addressing both normal and potential medical complications during the healing processes, these pages constitute on average only 3.6% of the total content found in the pregnancy manuals.7 In one particularly egregious example, Your Pregnancy, dedicated only 5 of 613 pages (0.08% of the book) to postpartum care. In contrast, this book also offers twelve to sixteen pages of explanation for each week of gestation (Curtis and Schuler 2008). Whereas the other texts among our set offer more information than Your Pregnancy, the overall average percentage is disturbingly low. This means that although the mother may have gone through profound physical changes, perhaps even major surgery, her recovery process receives minimal treatment in books that are supposedly intended to offer a step-

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by-step chronological account of pregnancy, delivery, recovery, and early infant care. These accounts constitute a kind of narrative, one that that deemphasizes the healing challenges in the fourth trimester. The general lack of information means that painful, even debilitating complications experienced by postpartum women are without the kind of authoritative acknowledgements that allow postpartum women to confi rm their experience and existence. The larger gynecological and obstetrics literature is, of necessity, far more attuned to the diagnosis and treatment of consequences and complications resulting from vaginal and C-section delivery.8 We do not maintain that the lay literature should approximate the professional literature, given the different audiences; nor do we maintain that exceedingly rare complications must be introduced into the popular literature. However, we cite the professional literature to innumerate the scope of the challenges faced in normal as well as medically complicated recovery from vaginal or C-section delivery. The professional literature explanations include but are not limited to afterpains; sore muscles; heavy vaginal bleeding; urinary incontinence; fecal incontinence; hemorrhoids; constipation; fractured tailbone; calf pain (deep vein thrombosis); abdominal pain from C-section incision; fi rst-, second-, third-, and fourth-degree tears from vaginal delivery; pelvic thrombosis; pulmonary embolism; hematoma in the groin and abdomen; anal fissures; fistula; separation of the symphysis pubis; and infections of the uterus, urinary tract, perineum, and cervix. The lay literature does mention the most common pains and discomforts resulting from childbirth (on our list, after pains through vaginal tears); however, the explanations, as we have noted, are brief. One especially remarkable example is exceedingly brief lay discussion on vaginal tears. As one obstetrics text notes that “many women who give birth have an episiotomy or spontaneous vaginal lacerations of the perineum.” (Gabbe et al. 2002, 707) In fact, one of our six popular pregnancy guidebooks acknowledges that vaginal deliveries and operative vaginal deliveries result in some level of tear 50% of the time (Regan 2005, 433). Given the likelihood of such tearing and the standard practice of stitching second-, third-, and fourth-degree tears,9 one would expect the lay literature to offer explanation of the injury and the likely treatment.10 After all, the texts assert a commitment to helping women who seek an informed pregnancy and delivery. In actuality, it is difficult to fi nd a detailed and direct explanation that differentiates these very common perineum tears, their treatment, and their potential complications or consequences. In reference to such tears, What to Expect When You’re Expecting merely notes that after delivery of the placenta, “all that’s left to do, then, is for your practitioner to stitch up any tear” (Murkhoff and Mazel 2008, 397). Later, the same text offers advice on how to care for a tender or stitched perineum. The advice focuses on hygiene and soothing the pain (Murkhoff and Mazel 2008, 397). Yet there is no focused discussion of the

Where Did I Go? 41 tear or the actual repair of the perineum. Great Expectations offers a similarly brief acknowledgment: “If you had a vaginal birth, the area around your vagina and rectum will probably be swollen, distended, and tender for several weeks after birth. If you were given stitches from an episiotomy, have a tear, or had a cesarean section, you may have swelling, soreness, scabbing, and possibly bruising where you were cut and sewn” (Jones and Jones 2004, 366). A bit further on, the same text offers a list of “comfort measures for your perineum” (Jones and Jones 2004, 369). You & Your Baby offers two sentences: “The baby’s head will stretch your perineum and you may tear” (Riley 2006, 347); “Afterward your provider will stitch up your tear or episiotomy, if necessary” (Riley 2006, 348). Your Pregnancy offers two bullet points that mention likely soreness from an episiotomy or tear (Curtis and Schuler 2008, 595–596). The Pregnancy Bible offers a couple reassuring sentences that suggest tears are unlikely and a minimal concern: “Frequently, the skill and patience of an experienced healthcare provider will stretch the area and allow the baby to be born with minimal or no tears and no episiotomy. Sometimes a small tear is easily repaired and causes less pain than a large and invasive episiotomy” (Stone and Eddleman 2003, 187). And later: “Before you leave the birthing room you’ll be stitched if you had an episiotomy or tear. Most women hardly notice this is happening, they’re so preoccupied with their babies, but you’ll be given a local anesthetic if necessary” (Stone and Eddleman 2003, 252). Only one text from our set, I’m Pregnant, provided a frank and detailed discussion of tears and stitching. The explanation is organized in two sections; a two-page discussion titled “Episiotomies and Tears” offers a full third of a page explaining the different degrees of perineal tears (Regan 2005, 331). A later section titled “Concerns after Birth” explains the possibility of infection, hematoma, and the potential need for later intervention or physical therapy for persistent problems in healing (Regan 2005, 433). This text is unusual in its forthright explanation of vaginal tears. Our point here is that the issue of vaginal tears is typically treated with brevity, despite the fact that tears are common and there is notable disagreement over whether practitioners need to stitch second-degree tears. This is one demonstration of a pattern in which a literature that claims to prepare and inform is leaving women who deliver vaginally with only a narrow context in which to understand their bodies and their healing. In this context it is all too easy for her experience to be perceived as abnormal. Furthermore, the lay literature provides only a minimal discussion of tears while providing detailed discussions about breastfeeding and how the infant is adjusting to the new world outside the womb. Most of the lay literature manuals repeat some version of the mantra “breast is best.” What follows after that is typically an explanation of benefits of colostrum and breast milk, how to establish a good latch, measures by which to determine if the baby is getting enough milk, advice on how to maintain a good breastfeeding relationship, and a brief statement on what medicines are

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safe while breastfeeding. The more comprehensive texts will also discuss challenges to breastfeeding, including cracked nipples, clogged ducts, thrush, and mastitis. Only rarely are breast abscesses treated in detail.11 The level of detail in discussions on mastitis and breast abscess is noteworthy because, after the issue of perineal tears, it is a second indicator of the extent to which the text admits to serious and painful challenges found in the postpartum experience. Globally, the incidence of lactation mastitis ranges between 3% and 33%. (World Health Organization 2000)12 One commonly cited U.S. study finds an incidence rate of 9.5% in the first six weeks postpartum (Foxman et al. 2002). Mastitis is a risk factor for breast abscess. Of the 9.5% with mastitis, the same study found that 11% of women developed breast abscesses. Although mastitis is painful and is accompanied by flulike symptoms and fever, it rarely receives as much attention as, for example, the description of the odd sensations (full bladder and ultrasound gel) to be expected during a routine and noninvasive ultrasound. We support the inclusion of detailed explanations of how and why to breastfeed; however, we cannot help but note these often upbeat and richly detailed discussions serve as a further contrast with much briefer explanations of the mother’s physical recovery process. Of the two books that offer the longest sections on breastfeeding, Great Expectations and What to Expect When You’re Expecting, we note that these pages alone equal roughly half the pages dedicated to full scope of the mother’s postpartum healing process. The comparison between breastfeeding and maternal healing is even more revealing if one also notes that the same books dilute discussions of maternal recovery with paragraphs on normal hair loss13 and pages on weight loss (Murkhoff and Mazel 2008, 485–68; Jones and Jones 2004, 382–84). The restricted content and absence of important information sends the message that the physical recovery process of the fourth trimester is relatively inconsequential. Such a message is reinforced by a range of stylistic moves that communicate the limited importance of the postpartum mother’s body. For example, Your Pregnancy, a text that offers extensive medical terminology and careful prose explanations throughout the chapters on pregnancy, lapses into bullet points and thus speeds through the full postpartum year in five pages (Curtis and Schuler 2008, 595–600). Immediately following the postpartum section, the author returns to a careful prose style for the sections on newborns and proper breastfeeding technique (Curtis and Schuler 2008, 601–613). The section appears to be an afterthought at best, something added without the same concern or import as the rest of the book. This conveys the message that once the baby is born, there really is nothing else of importance that needs to be addressed. The postpartum experience is not only erased as a relevant subject of concern in the childbirth literature. The postpartum woman herself is erased as someone whose needs and interests exist apart from her baby and partner. That is, as the lay literature of pregnancy depicts the situation, the postpartum women’s needs are derived from the needs of others

Where Did I Go? 43 rather than existing simply because she is valuable in and of herself. More specifically, the texts assume a heterosexual couple and a nuclear family in which the mother adopts a traditional middle-class domestic roll. This construction is prominent in the literature’s discussions of the sixweek checkup and sexuality. Specifically, all of the texts under consideration advise the woman to expect her six-week checkup discussion to include the following: contraception, her current level of activity, limitations (specifically with respect to sex and exercise), and future pregnancies. The texts advise the postpartum woman to discuss, not her physical needs as they related to childbirth or recovery, but rather those related to meeting her partner’s sexual and reproductive needs. Overall, the pattern of advice reveals an abiding interest in helping women return to an active sex life in the postpartum period. For example, although What to Expect explicitly states that women should not do anything they do not yet feel comfortable doing, the larger section offers advice on how women should lubricate in preparation for penetration, loosen up, and learn to have sex in ways that avoid sore spots (Murkhoff and Mazel 2008, 463–64). When this does not seem appealing, women are advised to fi nd alternative ways to achieve sexual gratification.14 These books purport to give women advice about their recovery but are instead helping women recover in order to meet other people’s needs. These discussions on the six-week checkup and sexuality provide examples of the relationship between the erasure and the oppression of postpartum women, as well as the mutually reinforcing relationship between the two. First, the postpartum experience and postpartum women’s needs are erased by the literature in the ways just described. This erasure is possible, and often goes unremarked, because of a larger oppressive culture in which women’s needs continue to be understood and interpreted in light of their partner’s and children’s needs. As a result of cultural norms of heterosexual nuclear families, postpartum women’s needs are not acknowledged in the lay literature because they are not acknowledged to exist in larger cultural narratives. Women are not understood to have significant concerns after childbirth. When the texts foster a conception of reality in which postpartum healing is a straightforward affair, they further reinforce the larger cultural assumptions about the secondary importance of women, especially postpartum women. For the woman who does not have this experience, her deviation from the “norm” becomes a resource for further psychological oppression in which she cannot fi nd herself or her narrative. Her experience is an aberration: she is an aberration. In this way, the literature’s near silence on the topic of complications mystifies the way that postpartum women and their experiences are erased. Women see themselves as abnormal and cannot see the social and cultural assumptions that actually construct them as abnormal. All the while the texts continue to advocate for dominant cultural constructions of womanhood using gendered stereotypes about proper domestic maintenance and the care for other’s needs. In total,

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the priority of child and partner appears natural and normal, whereas her health and her concern for her own needs are abnormal. The childbirth literature also contributes to women’s oppression by setting up a system that places postpartum women amid double binds that, regardless of their choices, make women vulnerable to facing negative consequences for their own health. More specifically, in the context of gender stereotypes just discussed, the advice given often instructs postpartum women to do something to care for themselves and then something else that would require them to care for the baby at the expense of her own recovery. For example, to address perineal pain and tearing, women are advised to take sitz baths that last about twenty minutes three times per day and to keep pressure off of the perineal area. When applied to the everyday life of a postpartum woman whose time is largely dominated by caring for a newborn, it is often impossible to follow this advice; the woman must choose between herself or her infant, especially if she does not have a lot of help with the baby. If the woman chooses herself, she is deemed selfish; and if she chooses the baby, her recovery is lengthened and more painful. Double binds that affect postpartum women as such (i.e., the reason a woman faces the double bind is due to her social group membership as a woman) can contribute to oppression when they are part of a larger system of gender roles that come together to make it more difficult for such women to live the kinds of lives they desire. As we have seen, these women face these double binds because of their social position and ideas about social roles. However, these patterns are often obscured or mystified such that they seem normal or natural. And the childbirth literature contributes to this obfuscation. By mystifying the postpartum period in the ways just highlighted, the childbirth literature contributes to postpartum women’s psychological oppression. One aspect of psychological oppression is that the oppressed often “are unable to make sense of [their] own impulses or feelings . . . because [they] are forced to find [their] way in a world which presents itself to [them] in a masked and deceptive fashion” (Bartky 1990, 31). Because of the lack of information about the fourth trimester, the way in which the limited information is conveyed, and the use of gender stereotypes as if they were facts, postpartum women are often unable to make sense of their own experiences. For example, if a woman is constantly experiencing pain while breastfeeding because she has mastitis or a vascular problem but cannot get any information or advice that differs from “push your way through it,” then she may feel like she is doing something wrong. She may feel that she is a failure and that she is alone in these problems. Similarly, if a woman has suffered a third-degree tear but does not have information about tears, then she may be less likely to get help, may experience more pain than she has to, may resent her child or her partner or both, and may generally suffer unnecessarily because she lacks important information. These are just some illustrations of the way in which the literature contributes to postpartum women’s psychological oppression. Insofar as this literature contributes to such obfuscation and neglects the discussion of complications in the postpartum period, the literature advances

Where Did I Go? 45 and reinforces the oppression of women while simultaneously making it more difficult for women to care for themselves. All of these phenomena take place in a literature that claims to provide a resource for women who want to make informed choices about their care.

CONCLUSION The absence of material about the normal and sometimes extremely demanding physical and emotional changes experienced in the fourth trimester is surprising and much in need of critique. The lack of information about the fourth trimester erases the postpartum woman and prevents her from gaining key information about her body, which harms her and reinforces a pattern of treating mothers as secondary once the child is born. The message sent is that babies are important, women are not. Thus, we call for a lay literature and a culture that affi rms the existence and importance of postpartum women in their own right. NOTES 1. In this chapter we use the terms “fourth trimester” and “postpartum” interchangeably. There is no absolute consensus on the amount of time that constitutes the fourth trimester. However, the professional practice of a six-week gynecological checkup has become one common marker for the end of this period. Because not all women are completely healed within six weeks and breastfeeding challenges like mastitis continue to occur well past this marker, we have generally opted to think of (at least) the fi rst three months after birth as the fourth trimester; we are also willing to extend our defi nition of this period to six months postpartum. 2. More specifically, we restricted our focus to six of the most popular manuals available to English-reading North Americans: Great Expectations: Your All-in-One Resource for Pregnancy & Childbirth; I’m Pregnant: A Weekby-Week Guide from Conception to Birth; The Pregnancy Bible: Your Complete Guide to Pregnancy and Early Parenthood; What to Expect When You’re Expecting; You & Your Baby: Pregnancy: The Ultimate Week-byWeek Pregnancy Guide; Your Pregnancy Week by Week. The most widely recognized book is What to Expect When You’re Expecting. This icon is now in its fourth edition and, as we write this chapter, Workman Publishing notes that 14.5 million copies are in print and 90% of women who read a pregnancy guide will use What to Expect When You’re Expecting, http://www. workman.com/products/9780761148579 (accessed November 1, 2010). 3. Glade B. Curtis and Judith Schuler, Your Pregnancy Week by Week is a good example. The text doesn’t shy away from technical language, uses few illustrations, and provides a glossary for the reader. 4. Most of the texts take this form. See Sandy Jones and Marcie Jones, Great Expectations; Laura Riley, You & Your Baby; Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel, What to Expect When You’re Expecting. 5. Lesley Regan, I’m Pregnant; Joanne Stone and Keith Eddleman, The Pregnancy Bible. These texts blend full-color photos and illustrations with nearly every page of text. The result resembles a high-school human biology book,

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

though plenty of the images would create a stampede of resistance for the local school board. Sandy Jones and Marcie Jones, Great Expectations offers a chapter “Your Complete Mother’s Manual,” 361–451. Lesley Regan, I’m Pregnant offers a chapter “Life After Birth,” 372–405; Joanne Stone and Keith Eddleman, eds., The Pregnancy Bible offers Part IV “Now You’re a Family” and Part V “Postpartum Reference”—a full five chapters, 281–383; Laura Riley, You &Your Baby offers two sections, “Feeding Your Baby” and “Postpartum and Baby Care,” 357–404; Glade M. Curtis and Judith Schuler, Your Pregnancy Week by Week offers a section “What Happens After Your Pregnancy,” 595–600; Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel, What to Expect When You’re Expecting offers Part IV “Postpartum: The First Week,” “Postpartum: The First 6 Weeks,” two full chapters, 420–70. In calculating these percentages we focused only on material that addressed the mother’s health as contrasted with the larger discussions of pregnancy, infant care, and bonding. In terms of chronology, we began with material that explained the mother’s recovery experience immediately following the delivery of the placenta. We excluded discussions of breastfeeding, bonding, and depression as each of these remains inextricably bound to the mother-infant relationship and ultimately the infant’s well-being. The general method of counting pages, generating percentages, and averaging percentages is decidedly inexact. Yet this method is the most efficient means of illustrating the dramatic difference between content on pregnancy, baby care, and bonding as contrasted with material that exclusively addresses the healing process and potential complications that face postpartum women. For consultation purposes we used Alan DeCherney and others, Obstetrics and Gynecology, 10th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007); F. Gary Cunningham and others, Williams Obstetrics, 20th ed., (Stamford, CT: Appleton and Lang, 1997); Roger P. Smith, Netters Obstetrics and Gynecology, 2nd edition, (New York: Elsevier Health Sciences, 2008). For the uninitiated, “First-degree lacerations involve the fourchette, perineal skin, and vaginal mucous membrane but not the underlying fascia and muscle. Second-degree lacerations involve, in addition to skin and mucous membrane, the fascia and muscles of the perineal body but not the rectal sphincter. These tears usually extend upward on the vagina, forming an irregular triangular injury. Third-degree lacerations extend through the skin, mucous membrane and perineal body, and involve the anal sphincter. A fourth-degree laceration extends through the rectal mucosa to expose the lumen of the rectum” (Cunningham 1007, 342). We also note that there is disagreement in the research literature over whether or not secondary tears should be stitched. Accepted practice among gynecologists and obstetricians is to stitch second degree lacerations; however, some argue that rate of healing and pain does not differ across groups of women stitched and those who heal without stitches. Given the difference in views, to stitch or not, this is a key point where the mothers themselves ought to be allowed an opportunity for input. But with no discussion of lacerations, and absolutely no mention of treatment options, the choice doesn’t exist. What to Expect does the best job, with a complete paragraph that notes potential need for surgery. Although an incidence rate of 33 percent is assuredly on the high end, one may note that this rate was found among women who breastfed for a year. By contrast, many mastitis studies focus on the very early months of breastfeeding. J.M. Riordan and F.H. Nichols, “A descriptive study of lactation mastitis

Where Did I Go? 47 in long-term breastfeeding women,” The Journal of Human Lactation June 6 no. 2 (1990) 53–58. 13. Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel, What to Expect, 453–54; Sandy Jones and Marcie Jones, Great Expectations, 368. As the texts both note, the hormones of pregnancy make women shed less hair while they are pregnant. Thus postpartum hair loss is not a net loss; it is actually a return to ones pre-pregnancy baseline. However, the attention to hair loss is especially disturbing given our larger criticism, the abbreviated discussion of potentially serious postpartum complications. Even more troubling, the texts feel that postpartum hair concerns warrant shampoo and styling advice. 14. Assuredly sex-positive advice is much needed. However, our concern is that the lay advice, which assumes a (male) partner, continues to focus the mother’s attention on the needs of others.

WORKS CITED Bartky, Sandra Lee. 1990. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. New York: Routledge. Cunningham, F. Gary, et al. 1997. Williams Obstetrics. 20th ed. Stamford, CT: Apleton and Lange. Curtis, Glade B., and Judith Schuler. 2008. Your Pregnancy Week by Week. 6th ed. Philadelphia: Da Capo. DeCherney, Alan H., T. Murphy Goodwin, Lauren Nathan, and Neri Laufer. 2007. Current Diagnosis & Treatment Obstetrics & Gynecology. 10th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. Fleming, Valerie E. M, Suzanne Hagen, and Catherine Niven. 2003. “Does Perineum Suturing Make a Difference? The SUNS Trial.” BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 110 (July): 684–89. Foxman, Betsy, Hannah D’Arey, Brenda Gillespie, Jane Kay Bobo, and Kendra Schwartz. 2002. “Lactation Mastitis: Occurrence and Medical Management among 946 Breastfeeding Women in the United States.” American Journal of Epidemiology 155.2: 103–14. Frye, Marilyn. 1983. The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Freedom, CA: Crossing. Gabbe, Steven G., Jennifer R. Niebyl, and Joe Leigh Simpson, eds. 2002. Obstetrics: Normal and Problem Pregnancies. 4th ed. New York: Churchill Livingston. Grant, Adrian, Beverly Gordon, Carolyn Mackrodat, Elizabeth Fern, Ann Truesdale, and Sarah Ayers. 2001. “The Ipswich Childbirth Study: One Year Follow Up of Alternative Methods Used in Perineal Repair.” British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology 108 (January): 34–40. Jones, Sandy, and Marcie Jones. 2004. Great Expectations: Your All-in-One Resource for Pregnancy & Childbirth. New York: Sterling. Lundquist, Martina, Ann Olsson, Eva Nissen, and Margareta Norman. 2000. “Is It Necessary to Suture All Lacerations after a Vaginal Delivery?” Birth 27.2 (June): 79–85. Morhason-Bello, I. O., O. A. Adesina, M. A. Okunlola, A. Oladokun, A. A. Onibokun, and O. A. Ojengbebe. 2006. “Repair of Spontaneous Perineal Laceration at Delivery, A Cultural Taboo: A Case Report.” Annals of Ibadan Postgraduate Medicine 4.2 (December): 45–47. Murkoff, Heidi, and Sharon Mazel. 2008. What to Expect When You’re Expecting. 4th ed. New York: Workman.

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Regan, Lesley. 2005. I’m Pregnant: A Week-by-Week Guide from Conception to Birth. New York: DK. Riley, Laura. 2006. You & Your Baby: Pregnancy: The Ultimate Week-by-Week Pregnancy Guide. Des Moines, IA: Meredith. Riordan, J. M., and F. H. Nichols. 1990. “A Descriptive Study of Lactation Mastitis in Long-Term Breastfeeding Women.” Journal of Human Lactation 6.2: 53–58. Smith, Roger. Netters Obstetrics and Gynecology. 2008. 2nd ed. New York: Elsevier. Stone, Joanne, and Keith Eddleman, eds. 2003. The Pregnancy Bible: Your Complete Guide to Pregnancy and Early Parenthood. Buffalo, NY: Firefly. World Health Organization. 2000. Mastitis: Causes and Management. Geneva: World Health Organization, Department of Child and Adolescent Health Development.

3

Into the Mouths of Babes The Moral Responsibility to Breastfeed Christine Overall and Tabitha Bernard

INTRODUCTION Personal decisions about procreation and mothering are often regarded as a matter of individual choice, the expression of liberty, preference, and practical need. They are not often seen as ethical decisions—that is, choices whose morality can legitimately be evaluated. In this chapter, however, we argue that birth mothers have, prima facie, a moral responsibility to breastfeed their infants. Some breastfeeding is better than none, and in keeping with the recommendations of the World Health Organization, we advocate six months of exclusive breastfeeding followed by breastfeeding along with feedings of solids until the baby is eighteen months old or more (World Health Organization 2008). By claiming that there is a moral responsibility to breastfeed, we mean several things. First, breastfeeding ought to be the norm; that is, the default assumption should be that birth mothers will breastfeed their infants. There are immediate exceptions, of course; for example, when an infant is surrendered for adoption. Aside from exceptional cases, however, we are saying that women ought to breastfeed their infants, and the “ought” in this statement is a moral ought, not merely a pragmatic one. Second, we use the word “responsibility” to stress that we are not talking about an impersonal or general obligation, but rather the moral need for a genuine response on each new mother’s part to the fragile and vulnerable being whom her body has made. Third, women who deliberately choose not to breastfeed their infants are, prima facie, committing a moral mistake, although its wrongness may be mitigated or even eliminated by extenuating circumstances. They are choosing a path that is less morally desirable, not only a path that is less healthy or less advisable. Part of being a good mother is breastfeeding one’s infant, or at least attempting in good faith to do so. We also want to be clear about what we do not mean. Our claim does not mean or imply that women’s breastfeeding, or other aspects of their mothering, should in any way be policed, legislated, or compelled. Nor does it imply any advocacy of or need for surveillance of mothers. There are, after all, plenty of moral responsibilities whose existence has

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no legal implications. For example, a good parent has an obligation, other things being equal, not to smoke in the presence of her child. Nonetheless, it would be not just impractical and ineffective, but also downright tyrannical, to invoke any kind of state apparatus to oversee parents and prevent them from smoking in their own home. Similarly, we are in no way arguing for social or legal interference in women’s mothering, or for social or medical oversight of mothers’ activities. Our argument does have some social policy implications, but those implications are all about fi nding ways to provide support for women’s role as breastfeeders, and we discuss them in the last section of this chapter. In addition, we do not assume that women always have choices about their procreative and maternal activities. It is indubitable that some women do not have access to effective contraception or supportive and inexpensive abortion services; as a result, some women end up pregnant against their will. Moreover, some women have to mother in circumstances that are far from ideal, both for the mother and the child—poverty, racism, sexism, and homophobia are among them. Hence, as Rebecca Kukla points out, it is a mistake to “treat maternal choices as independent and primary determinants of children’s health” (Kukla 2006, 158). Some women must deal with abusive and hateful partners. Some women did not receive a good upbringing and education as children. Some women were nutritionally deprived. Some were sexually and physically assaulted. Some are isolated from family and friends. Some do not have access to good health care. There are many circumstances that compromise, to a lesser or greater extent, women’s efforts to be good mothers. But we also believe it is a mistake to think of women as mere victims of patriarchal oppression, exploitation, and manipulation. Women are not just helpless pawns in their procreative and parenting activities. Women can and do resist oppression, exploitation, and manipulation. Women want good lives for themselves and their children. Women are motivated to do what is good for their children and good for themselves. Women are capable of reflecting on their work as mothers and deciding what they can do to make child rearing go better for their children, themselves, and their other family members. It is in the spirit of recognizing women’s strengths that we write this chapter. The remainder of this chapter is presented in four sections. In the fi rst, we offer arguments to support the existence of a moral responsibility to breastfeed. In the second, we evaluate the kinds of circumstances in which the moral responsibility to breastfeed may be mitigated or rendered nonexistent. In the third section, we consider and reply to potential counterarguments to our main claim. Finally, we situate the breastfeeding decision, experience, and relationship within its more general social and political context; and we make some suggestions about the kinds of changes that would assist, encourage, and educate about the responsibility to breastfeed.

Into the Mouths of Babes 51 WHY IS THERE A MORAL RESPONSIBILITY TO BREASTFEED? The arguments in support of a responsibility to breastfeed draw upon the very positive effects of breastfeeding on both child and mother, of which there is considerable empirical evidence.1 The fi rst set of arguments is based on the positive health effects of breastfeeding for infants. Breast milk is clearly superior to formula because it is always fresh and exactly the right composition for the baby’s growth. It helps the infant develop immunities, including protection from diarrhea and pneumonia, and it reduces the possibilities of future problems with allergies. A metareview of hundreds of studies of breastfeeding in developed countries concluded that “a history of breastfeeding was associated with a reduction in the risk of acute otitis media, non-specific gastroenteritis, severe lower respiratory tract infections, atopic dermatitis, asthma (young children), obesity, type 1 and 2 diabetes, childhood leukemia, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), and necrotizing enterocolitis” (Ip et al. 2007, abstract). By contrast, some baby formula carries risks of bacterial contamination (Van Acker et al. 2001; Weir 2002). The risk of obesity is higher in children who are formula fed (Child Health Information Team et al. 2002; Von Kries 1999; Frye and Heinrich 2003; Weyermann et al. 2006). Formula-fed babies have more gastrointestinal infections, more middle-ear infections, and more respiratory infections (J. H. Wolf 2006, 400). There is also significant evidence of slightly impaired cognitive development in babies who are not breast-fed (Quinn et al. 2001; Richards et al. 2002), especially for babies whose birth weight is low (Rao et al. 2002; Smith et al. 2003; Daniels and Adair 2005). Premature infants get even more cognitive benefit from breastfeeding (Hopkinson 2007, 643). In addition, there is evidence that infants in the United States who are never breast-fed run a greater risk of dying in the postneonatal period (Chen and Rogan 2004). Ceteris paribus, breastfeeding is very good for babies in both the short and long term; this is one reason that women have a responsibility to breastfeed. Breastfeeding is also good for women. 2 Health Canada identifies the following benefits for mothers of six months of exclusive breastfeeding: delayed return of menses with the resulting wider spacing of births, 3 reduced blood loss and reduced need for iron; and increased rate of weight loss4 (Health Canada 2004; Kac et al. 2004). The metareview by Ip et al. concludes that “for maternal outcomes, a history of lactation was associated with a reduced risk of type 2 diabetes, breast, and ovarian cancer. Early cessation of breastfeeding or not breastfeeding was associated with an increased risk of maternal postpartum depression” (2007, abstract). Breastfeeding mothers have more positive moods and perceive less stress than formula feeders (Groer 2005). In addition, breastfeeding helps to reduce the risk of endometrial cancer and osteoporosis (Gwinn 1990; Rosenblatt et al. 1993; Rosenblatt et al. 1995; Blaauw et al. 1994; Melton et al. 1993; Zheng et al. 2001).

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A skeptic might agree that mothers benefit from breastfeeding but doubt that such benefits can contribute to generating a responsibility to breastfeed. Surely, it might be argued, we are not under a moral imperative to benefit ourselves. If we deliberately decline benefits for ourselves, we may be impractical, but not immoral. However, in this case, ceteris paribus, what is good for the mother is also good for her baby because breastfeeding helps to create and reinforce the bond between the woman and her child. Through breastfeeding, a mother can do something that benefits herself, knowing that she is also thereby helped to care for her baby. Hence, in advocating a responsibility to breastfeed, we are not calling for self-sacrifice or misery on the part of women. Instead, we are saying that it is not only acceptable but morally responsible to engage in a behavior that is good for oneself.

MITIGATING FACTORS Unfortunately, for some women breastfeeding carries potential psychological, physical, or social costs. Some of these problems can be dealt with fairly readily. Others are more problematic, and we are not dismissive of the genuine difficulties some women encounter. In some cases these costs, along with institutional and cultural barriers, mitigate or even eliminate any responsibility to breastfeed. As a result, it is not possible to precisely quantify either the extent or the obviation of a responsibility to breastfeed. That is, it is not possible to say that under these exact circumstances the responsibility to breastfeed prevails, whereas under those exact circumstances the problems and barriers negate the responsibility. Obviously, each new mother must make her own decision about breastfeeding. In this section, we simply acknowledge the potential difficulties and affi rm that they may mitigate or negate the responsibility to breastfeed. For example, on an individual level, the moral responsibility to breastfeed may be mitigated or rendered nonexistent because of the mother’s physical limitations (for example, breast reductions or augmentations)5 or illness (for example, HIV infection). More generally, the mother’s recovery from pregnancy and birth, the rate of a baby’s development and her path to learning to breastfeed, and the tempo of new motherhood as the woman adjusts to her new relationship and role are not well suited to the pace of developed countries, where speed, hyperstimulation, and productivity are the watchwords of twenty-fi rst-century life. Women and their infants are expected to adjust to the rest of the world; the world does not adjust to them. Under such circumstances, establishing and maintaining a breastfeeding relationship can be difficult. Gabrielle Palmer’s classic book The Politics of Breastfeeding (1988) provides a full and distressing discussion of the multiple ways in which highly

Into the Mouths of Babes 53 medicalized birthing, the takeover of breastfeeding by scientists, and the profit-making motives of formula companies and baby-food manufacturers have distorted, compromised, and undermined women’s ability and commitment to breastfeed (Palmer 1988, 8). Indeed, the formula industry is winning the battle for the hearts and minds of mothers. As Hopkinson points out, “the percentage of mothers in the United States who agree with the statement that ‘infant formula is as good as breastmilk’ increased from 14.3 percent to 25.7 percent between 1999 and 2003.” Hopkinson goes on to ask, “who benefits from this? Who is willing to benefit from this?” (2007, 645). We also recognize concerns about the difficulties of breastfeeding in public places, or even in more “private” contexts such as family settings, if the woman is not supported and welcomed. As Kukla puts it, “breastfeeding opens women to offended, sexualized, and even violent and punitive gazes” (2006, 163). Reconciling breastfeeding with the demands of unsupportive, inflexible, unfriendly, and dangerous workplaces can also be difficult or impossible. Long work hours lengthen the time between feedings, and most workplaces are not congenial to or safe for babies. And the mother may have no place to express milk other than an unsanitary toilet facility (J. B. Wolf 2007a, 622). Kukla also worries about women who experience breastfeeding as inappropriately sexual. She thinks they will be less likely to breastfeed (2006, 166 ff.). She may be right, but whether sexual feelings during breastfeeding discourage breastfeeding is an empirical question. In a society where women’s bodies are highly sexualized and valued mainly or exclusively for the sake of their erotic significance to men, it may be difficult for women to simply enjoy their breasts, their feelings, and the experience of breastfeeding. Indeed, some women are simply repulsed by breastfeeding and feel that their breasts are their own, not for the use by a baby. Survivors of sexual abuse may face special challenges: Breastfeeding can trigger abuse memories and post-traumatic stress episodes. Some women experience irrational, unbearable rage at the normal, playful behavior of their infants during breastfeeding. Fortythree percent of new mothers who are not breastfeeding describe it as “primitive,” “ugly,” or “unpleasant.” Low-income women are more likely to describe breastfeeding as “embarrassing.” Women who are uncomfortable with their body shape or their capacity to control their body, such as women with eating disorders and other kinds of dysmorphia and obsessive-compulsive disorder, are substantially less likely to breastfeed their infants. (Kukla 2006, 163) The fact that some women see this very human function as embarrassing, primitive, or ugly is truly disturbing. It is a perspective that is probably exacerbated by social attitudes toward women, breasts, and sexuality,

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creating a climate where breasts must be “perky” and perpetually youthful. A woman who recognizes this perspective in herself, and nonetheless knows the advantages of breastfeeding, might take steps, with the aid of a counselor or a support group, to change her attitudes. But many women do not have access to psychological help and are not able to change their feelings about breastfeeding through sheer force of will. We do not regard such women as having a responsibility to breastfeed. Thus, sometimes women cannot manage, through no fault of their own, to breastfeed; if so, they do not have a responsibility to breastfeed. It may therefore seem that our claim about the responsibility to breastfeed is so diminished by the admission of social and individual impediments to breastfeeding as to be empty. Not so; the sheer value of breastfeeding makes the assertion of the responsibility to breastfeed essential—particularly because, as we show in the next section, some criticisms of it are groundless and even irresponsible.

REPLIES TO COUNTERARGUMENTS First, it might be objected that it is sexist to suppose that women have a moral responsibility that men do not and cannot have.6 In her article “The Case Against Breastfeeding,” Hanna Rosin, herself a veteran of “28 months of breastfeeding (and counting),” rails against “being stuck at home breastfeeding” as her husband walks out the door, and sees herself as a twentyfi rst-century victim of Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name”—the problem of sexism (Rosin 2009, 2). Rosin lauds a “young and healthy and normal” woman who “refused to breastfeed her children.” This woman “wasn’t working at the time”—by which Rosin presumably means she was not doing paid work. The woman “just felt that breastfeeding would set up an unequal dynamic in her marriage—one in which the mother, who was responsible for the very sustenance of the infant, would naturally become responsible for everything else as well.” Rosin says she herself fi nds it “hard not to seethe” when she has to nurse her own infant in the middle of the night, while the child’s father sleeps (2009, 7). There is a crucial truth here: men cannot breastfeed. Does that fact put women at a disadvantage? It might—but not because of breastfeeding itself. The disadvantage arises because of the way the breastfeeding woman is treated, either individually, within the home, or socially, as member of society whose breastfeeding work is not adequately valued. Systemic oppressions make lactation into a social liability for some women, while placing no comparable obstacles in men’s path. At home her male partner7 could of course contribute to baby care in many ways. He could prepare the mother’s meals, change the baby’s diaper after a feeding, do the laundry and grocery shopping, clean the house,

Into the Mouths of Babes 55 and bathe and play with the baby. If the breastfeeding woman suffers from inequality in her relationship, it is not because of breastfeeding, but because of her partner’s failure to contribute in other ways. Rosin claims that couples reason as follows: “she alone fed the child, so she naturally knows better how to comfort the child, so she is the better judge to pick a school for the child and the better nurse when the child is sick” (2009, 7). We can only hope that Rosin is engaging in deliberate hyperbole here because of course there is nothing about the fact of breastfeeding that makes a male partner unable to know how to comfort a child, care for it when ill, or “pick a school.” A more worrying feminist concern might be that advocating a responsibility to breastfeed contributes to “the new momism,” according to which “mothers are expected not only to protect their children from immediate threats but also to predict and prevent any circumstance that might interfere with putatively normal development. . . . Mothers are exhorted to optimize every dimension of children’s lives, beginning with the womb” (J. B. Wolf 2007a, 615). If they fail to do so, they are considered failures. As French feminist Elisabeth Badinter says, “If you don’t want to breastfeed, you are asked, “But Madame, don’t you want the best for your child?” It makes you feel terribly guilty.” The expectation that women should breastfeed worries Badinter “because we are creating another model of motherhood where the mother is with her baby 24 hours a day for at least six months. This is a model that eats the personal part of each woman as an individual” (Badinter, quoted in Sage 2010). Social messages that allegedly promote guilt also concern Kukla, who provides a powerful critique of American public health messages in support of breastfeeding. Although she agrees that “achieving and maintaining high rates of initiating and continuing breastfeeding should be important public health goals” (2006, 160), Kukla casts doubts on what she calls “an easy individualist politics of blame” and suggests that we ought not to see mothers’ choices as “straightforward and self-contained sites of moral accountability” (2006, 159). Pressuring women is not only counterproductive to the goals of increasing the frequency of breastfeeding and validating breastfeeding as a practice because anxious, resentful, or guilty feelings are not good motivators and could undermine breastfeeding (Hopkinson 2007, 645), but such pressure is also morally unjustified. We do not support the “new momism”; nor do we believe mothers must strive for perfection and sacrifice their own needs and well-being. We do not endorse public health campaigns intended to induce feelings of guilt and anxiety in women who do not breastfeed. We are not saying pressuring women is the way to get more women to breastfeed or to breastfeed for longer. This is an academic argument, not a piece of propaganda. It is not intended to shame women into nursing their infants or to make them feel anxious or defensive.8 Although we believe that promoting breastfeeding is desirable, it is also appropriate to criticize—as the work of Kukla and of Joan Wolf has

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done—public health campaigns that exaggerate the risks of not breastfeeding. Nonetheless, there is a danger that the criticism of inappropriate public health campaigns for breastfeeding can slide into criticism of breastfeeding itself. It is essential to distinguish between them. This chapter defends breastfeeding as a practice, not all campaigns that support breastfeeding. Kukla goes so far as to say that the strategies and images used by current breastfeeding advocates “constitute unethical assaults on new mothers’ autonomy and agency” (2006, 175). By this criterion, probably most forms of advertising constitute assaults on people’s autonomy and agency. Yet it is not implausible to suppose that, in this age of persuasion, people still manage to be autonomous, independent agents who are able to think for themselves. We should not suppose that mothers are less able to do the same. Simply arguing that women have a prima facie moral responsibility to breastfeed does not reduce women’s autonomy or negate their right to choose. Instead it recognizes and values women’s autonomy. Of course women have a right to choose whether or not to breastfeed; we in no way deny it. Their bodies are their own; unlike misogynist media, we do not assume that a woman’s breasts belong to anyone but her and her alone. It is because she is an embodied, breasted being that the choice whether to breastfeed is hers alone—although of course other forces may, in some cases, make it difficult or even impossible for her to exercise that choice freely. At the same time, choosing how to feed a newborn is not simply a matter of deciding between two equally good alternatives. Breastfeeding is not just a “lifestyle.” It has special advantages, indicated in the fi rst section, that are not duplicated by formula-feeding. That is why we argue that breastfeeding is a moral responsibility. There is something peculiar about the haste with which feminists accuse those who advocate breastfeeding of inappropriately “guilting” women.9 Clearly, creating anxiety in others is not a great thing to do. However, we do not know that advocating breastfeeding has such an effect. Joan Wolf, for example, speaks of the American National Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign as “provok[ing] extreme fear or anxiety” (2007a, 599) and “enormous upheaval in untold lives” (2007a, 625), but she and other feminists worried about causing guilt in women provide no evidence that it does. In any case, feeling guilty may sometimes be appropriate. Consider the French writer Corinne Maier, author of the notorious book No Kids: 40 Good Reasons Not to Have Children (2008). After listing—albeit in a skeptical tone—the benefits of breastfeeding, Maier writes that she “told the maternity ward staff that there was absolutely no question of my nursing my baby.” According to Maier, breastfeeding is painful and nursing women’s breasts are ugly (“scored with creases . . . milk clots on the nipples— they’re disgusting!”). Breastfeeding, she concludes, “is slavery” (2008, 24). She adds sarcastically, “The noose is tightening on those unworthy women who bottle-feed” (2008, 23). Maier is the last person to feel guilty about anything related to child rearing, but perhaps she should feel some qualms

Into the Mouths of Babes 57 about refusing to do what she admits is better for her baby. Her qualms about the appearance of nursing women’s breasts are exaggerated, even grotesque. Sometimes we have a moral responsibility to do things even if we don’t enjoy them. For example, some parents hate cooking and food preparation. But if they have children, then they have to do it. Other parents may loathe changing dirty diapers or the long and often messy process of toilet-training a child, but these tasks have to be done. There is also something odd about Rosin’s presentation of the case against breastfeeding as liberating. Why not instead see the commitment to breastfeed as both the response to a challenge and as an often-courageous choice? Breastfeeding may bring some difficulties, even serious problems, but so do many worthwhile human activities—including caring for the sick, teaching, and child rearing itself. We do not conclude that people should not care for the sick, teach, or rear children. Especially in cases where the well-being of others is at issue, it is surely not overkill to say that people have a responsibility to do these things and to try to do them well. Asserting that breastfeeding is a moral responsibility supports women by emphasizing that they are doing what is best when they breastfeed. It asserts the value of women’s bodies and the unique importance of a role that only women can fi ll. Kukla thinks it is “socially marginalized” women who have the most problems with breastfeeding (2006, 168). Similarly, Joan Wolf hyperbolically asks, “Is a potential increase in breastfeeding among middle-class babies worth the hardship it could bring to poor women and their families?” (2007b, 653). But surely we ought not to resign ourselves to the view that breastfeeding is an experience and activity only open to middle-class and wealthy women.10 Such an approach could even be condescending to poor and working-class women, who in fact have much to gain from breastfeeding—in terms of fi nances (by reducing the cost of feeding infants), bodily health, and pleasure. To read Kukla’s long list of breastfeeding impediments—both those that are clearly external (like hostile workplaces) and those that represent the internalization of oppressive messages (like the “ugliness” of breastfeeding)—it seems almost miraculous that any woman successfully breastfeeds at all. And yet women do, under all kinds of diffi cult circumstances, including enormous poverty, war, famine, and epidemic. “Breastfeeding can involve profound bodily vulnerabilities and boundary violations, threatening women’s privacy and their confidence in their own maternal character and mothering capacities,” writes Kukla (2006, 168). Yet giving birth also involves profound bodily vulnerabilities; under some circumstances it too can allow and encourage boundary violations and threaten women’s privacy and their confidence in their abilities. It might be argued that having survived a difficult birth, no woman should then be told that she has a responsibility to breastfeed. But the breastfeeding relationship can be a way for a woman to recover her autonomy, dignity,

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and confidence in the power of her body. Especially when it is difficult, successfully breastfeeding an infant can legitimately be seen as an accomplishment. Women who take up the challenge of breastfeeding—especially women who experience any of the significant impediments described in the previous section—are to be commended and can be genuinely and legitimately proud of themselves.

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT The decision whether or not to breastfeed does not take place in a moral and social vacuum. The breastfeeding decision, experience, and relationship must be situated within the general context of a society that sexualizes women’s bodies, promotes breast milk substitutes as allegedly equal to breast milk, and routinely fails to provide the support, resources, and locations, both economic and social, to enable women and their infants to have a successful and rewarding breastfeeding relationship. Hence, the decision to breastfeed is not simply a matter of individual women’s choices. It is related to a series of decisions made, consciously or unconsciously, by the society as a whole, which may make breastfeeding more or less practical and which may contribute to the valorization or the undermining of the breastfeeding relationship. Over the last eighty years or more, as Jacqueline Wolf writes, “economic pressure, class confl ict, and changing views of time, efficiency, self-control, health, medicine, science, sex, marriage, motherhood, and nature” have all contributed to making breastfeeding more difficult and less successful (2006, 405). The moral responsibility to support breastfeeding is, nonetheless, incumbent upon any progressive society that cares about the health and well-being of women and children.11 Such societies must be committed to introducing social, educational, and legal policies that support women’s breastfeeding of their infants and educate everyone about the importance of the breastfeeding relationship and how to establish and maintain it. As Kukla argues, women need “lactation support in hospitals, laws protecting public breastfeeding, [and] restrictions on formula advertising” (2006, 162). New mothers need information about “how to access milk banks, use breast pumps, [and] fi nd lactation support” (Kukla 2006, 174). On the job, all of the problems discussed in the second section must be fi xed: long and inflexible work hours; lack of adequate workday breaks; and the absence of private, clean, undisturbed places to pump.12 Even better, women need longer, and paid, maternity leaves and onsite childcare (Lepore 2009). Kukla argues that the public representation of breastfeeding must change, to include “images of breastfeeding women in the midst of complicated, public lives, wearing normal clothing suited to public spaces” (2006, 164). There should also be images of many different kinds of women

Into the Mouths of Babes 59 breastfeeding—women of all different abilities, races, appearances, body sizes, and ages. Information about breastfeeding must be aimed not only at present and future mothers but at fathers, other family members, healthcare providers, employers, and educators. There may be features of Western culture that not only make it difficult to breastfeed but also make breastfeeding appear as difficult as possible. These include the social isolation of many women (especially those who are new immigrants) and the enforcement of women’s dependence on medical authorities rather than networks of women who are experienced with breastfeeding. In the West, women have few children, they may have them relatively later in their lives, they are anxious to do the right thing— and they may never have seen a woman breastfeeding her baby. Their own mothers may not have breastfed. But they have very likely seen women bottle-feeding their infants. This cultural milieu gives women permission to believe that bottle-feeding is modern, progressive, and every bit as good as breastfeeding. Medicalized childbirth and the formula industry have contributed to breaking the connections by which women learn from other women how to breastfeed. Instead, we should be normalizing breastfeeding as a common practice, the default way of nourishing a baby, and a practice that children may witness their mothers, aunts, or older sisters engaged in so that they regard it as just part of caring for a newborn. Of course, women should be able to obtain information about how to handle problems with breastfeeding. Making women aware in advance, in a nonthreatening manner, of potential challenges makes it more likely that they will seek out support systems and resources prenatally. Such preparation is much better than facing unexpected difficulties and then having to figure out where and how to get help, when time is of the essence. But a cultural assumption that breastfeeding is always difficult and that many women will be unsuccessful will not only fail to win over new practitioners and advocates of breastfeeding; it may also increase the likelihood of failure and abandonment for women who are motivated to breastfeed. Telling a new mother breastfeeding is tough is a little like telling a prospective artist, scientist, or businessperson about how difficult and unpleasant it is to make art, do science, or conduct business. Almost any worthwhile human activity brings problems and difficulties, but if we want people to succeed, then it is the rewards, not the problems and difficulties, that should be highlighted.

CONCLUSION In this chapter we have argued that women have a responsibility to breastfeed their infants. The responsibility is defeasible: some conditions make breastfeeding so difficult or damaging that the mother does not have

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the responsibility. We showed that counterarguments to our thesis— the argument that expecting women to breastfeed reinforces inequality and the argument that it unfairly “guilts” women—are unsuccessful. Finally, we described the actions that a responsible society should take to support breastfeeding.

NOTES 1. See Jacqueline Wolf (J. H. Wolf 2006) for a summary of the many advantages of breastfeeding. For another view—extreme skepticism—of the evidence, see Joan Wolf (J. B. Wolf 2007a and 2007b). Joan Wolf claims that breastfeeding cannot be separated from the decision to breastfeed, which “could represent an orientation toward parenting that is itself likely to have a positive impact on children’s health” (J. B. Wolf 2007, 602). See Hopkinson (2007a) for a reply to Joan Wolf. Hopkinson suggests the possibility that “breastfeeding enhances mothering rather than or in addition to the converse” (2007, 644). 2. It’s good for women both individually and as members of society. Hopkinson points out that to the extent that breastfeeding keeps infants healthier, working mothers are less likely to miss work to care for a sick baby (2007, 641, 645). Joan Wolf, a skeptic about the value of breastfeeding for babies, nonetheless categorically states that “breastfeeding has many social advantages. It benefits the environment by reducing pollution and waste from production, packaging, and transportation of infant formula” (J. B. Wolf 2007a, 601). Also, see Palmer for a discussion of the high economic value of breast milk (1988, 245 ff.). 3. The wider spacing of births could also be economically advantageous for parents. 4. The extent to which weight loss is and is perceived as being an advantage for a woman is, of course, in part a function of the beauty standards of the culture in which she lives. 5. Whether women have a responsibility not to obtain breast augmentations because of their effects on breastfeeding is a separate question. At the very least, women should be fully informed that their ability to breastfeed may be compromised by breast implants, and they should make choices about augmentation with that fact in mind. However, once a woman has had this surgery, it makes no sense to say that she still has a responsibility to breastfeed. As philosophers often observe, “ought” implies “can.” To say that someone should do X is to imply that she is able to do X: if she lacks the capacity to do X, then it is false to say that she ought to do X. 6. Although several exceptional cases have been documented, and male breasts can be (manually and hormonally) stimulated to produce some breast milk (Swaminathan 2007), the majority of men do not have sufficient mammary tissue to produce a full supply. Most males do not have the capacity to lactate spontaneously. Further, there exists no evidence to suggest that the quality, safety, and suitability of male breast milk for human babies have ever been analyzed, nor is there evidence as to whether males who induce lactation using hormonal stimulation might encounter longer-term negative health consequences. Hence, we do not believe that males have a responsibility to attempt to induce lactation.

Into the Mouths of Babes 61 7. A female partner could also contribute in the same way. (We do not think a female partner who has not recently given birth has a responsibility to attempt to induce lactation in herself, except in very rare circumstances.) 8. We are, in any case, under no illusions that an academic volume will be effective, on its own, to bring about personal and social changes. 9. As Jacqueline Wolf points out, in the late twentieth century “formula companies, the HHS [U.S. Department of Health and Human Services], and leaders of the AAP [American Academy of Pediatrics] conspired to hide the health consequences of not breastfeeding in the name of protecting women from guilt lest they choose to formula feed” (J. H. Wolf 2006, 413–14; emphasis added). 10. In any case, as Palmer points out, which social class bottle-feeds and which one breastfeeds varies from society to society (1988, 69). 11. Jacqueline Wolf suggests that “working to facilitate successful breastfeeding would advance feminist interests in areas as varied as maternity leave, flexible work schedules, day care, breast cancer incidence, body image, and health reform” (J. H. Wolf 2006, 398). 12. But see Lepore (2009) for a critique of the social focus on enabling pumping, almost to the exclusion of providing longer maternity leaves.

WORKS CITED Blaauw, R., et al. 1994. “Risk Factors for Development of Osteoporosis in a South African Population.” South African Medical Journal 84:328–32. Chen, A., and W. J. Rogan. 2004. “Breastfeeding and the Risk of Postneonatal Death in the United States.” Pediatrics 113.5: E435–E439. Child Health Information Team, and J. J. Armstrong and J. J. Reilly. 2002. “Breastfeeding and Lowering the Risk of Childhood Obesity.” Lancet 359:2003–4. Daniels, Melissa C., and Linda S. Adair. 2005. “Breastfeeding Influences Cognitive Development in Filipino Children.” Journal of Nutrition 135:2589–95. Frye, C., and J. Heinrich. 2003. “Trend and Predictors of Overweight and Obesity in East German Children.” International Journal of Obesity 27:963–69. Groer, M. W. 2005. “Differences between Exclusive Breastfeeders, Formula-Feeders, and Controls: A Study of Stress, Mood and Endocrine Variables.” Biological Research for Nursing 7.2: 106–17. Gwinn, M. L. 1990. “Pregnancy, Breastfeeding and Oral Contraceptives and the Risk of Epithelial Ovarian Cancer.” Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 43:559–68. Health Canada. 2004. “Exclusive Breastfeeding Duration—2004 Health Canada Recommendation.”Accessed October 2, 2011. http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fn-an/ nutrition/infant-nourisson/exl_bf_dur-dur_am_excl-eng.php. Hopkinson, Judy M. 2007. “Response to ‘Is Breast Really Best?’ Risk and Total Motherhood in the National Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign.” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 32.4: 637–48. Ip, S., M. Chung, G. Raman, P. Chew, N. Magula, D. DeVine, T. Trikalinos, and J. Lau. 2007. “Breastfeeding and Maternal and Infant Health Outcomes in Developed Countries.” Evidence Report/Technology Assessment 153 (April): 1–186. Kac, G., M. H. D. A. Benício, G. Velásquez-Meléndez, J. G. Valente, and C. J. Struchiner. 2004. “Breastfeeding and Postpartum Weight Retention in a Cohort of Brazilian Women.” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 79:487–93.

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Kukla, Rebecca. 2006. “Ethics and Ideology in Breastfeeding Advocacy Campaigns.” Hypatia 21.1: 157–80. Lepore, Jill. 2009. “Baby Food.” New Yorker. Accessed October 2, 2011. http://www. newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/19/090119fa_fact_lepore?currentPage=all. Maier, Corinne. 2008. No Kids: 40 Good Reasons Not to Have Children. Trans. Patrick Watson. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Melton, L. J., S. C. Bryant, H. W. Wahner, W. M. O’Fallon, G. D. Malkasian, H. L. Judd, and B. L. Riggs. 1993. “Influence of Breastfeeding and Other Reproductive Factors on Bone Mass Later in Life.” Osteoporosis International 3:76–83. Palmer, Gabrielle. 1988. The Politics of Breastfeeding. London: Pandora. Quinn, P. J., M. O’Callagan, G. M. Williams, J. M. Najman, M. J. Anderson, and W. Bor. 2001. “The Effect of Breastfeeding on Child Development at 5 Years: A Cohort Study.” Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health 37.5: 465–69. Rao, M. R., M. L. Hediger, R. J. Levine, A. B. Naficy, and T. Vik. 2002. “Effect of Breastfeeding on Cognitive Development of Infants Born Small for Gestational Age.” Acta Pediatrica 91.3: 267–74. Richards, M., R. Hardy, and M. E. Wadsworth. 2002. “Long-Term Effects of Breastfeeding in a National Cohort: Educational Attainment and Midlife Cognition Function.” Public Health Nursing 5:631–35. Rosenblatt, Kerin A., David B. Thomas, and WHO Collaborative Study of Neoplasia and Steroid Contraceptives. 1993. “Lactation and the Risk of Epithelial Ovarian Cancer.” International Journal of Epidemiology 22.2: 192–97. Rosenblatt, Kerin A., David B. Thomas, and WHO Collaborative Study of Neoplasia and Steroid Contraceptives. 1995. “Prolonged Lactation and Endometrial Cancer.” International Journal of Epidemiology 24.3: 499–503. Rosin, Hanna. 2009. “The Case against Breastfeeding.” Atlantic Online. Accessed October 2, 2011. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200904/case-againstbreastfeeding. Sage, Adam. 2010. “Is Motherhood a Form of Oppression?” Times On Line. Accessed October 2, 2011. http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/ women/article7070165.ece. Smith, M. M., M. Durkin, V. J. Hinton, D. Bellinger, and L. Kuhn. 2003. “Influence of Breastfeeding on Cognitive Outcomes at Age 6–8 year Follow-up of Very Low-Birth Weight Infants.” American Journal of Epidemiology 158:1075–82. Swaminathan, Nikhil. 2007. “Strange but True: Males Can Lactate.” Scientific American. Accessed October 2, 2011. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article. cfm?id=strange-but-true-males-can-lactate. Van Acker, J., F. de Smet, G. Muyldermans, A. Bougatef, A. Naessens, and S. Lauwers. 2001. “Outbreak of Necrotizing Enterocolitis Associated with Enterobacter Sakazakii in Powdered Infant Formulas.” Journal of Clinical Microbiology 39:293–97. Von Kries, R., B. Koletzko, T. Sauerwald, E. Von Mutius, D. Barnert, V. Grunert, and H. Von Voss. 1999. “Breastfeeding and Obesity: Cross Sectional Study.” British Medical Journal 319:147–50. Weir, E. 2002. “Powdered Infant Formula and Fatal Infection with Enterobacter Sakazakii.” Canadian Medical Association Journal 166.12: 1570. Weyermann, M. D. Rothenbacher, and H. Brenner. 2006. “Duration of Breastfeeding and Risk of Overweight in Childhood: A Prospective Birth Cohort Study from Germany.” International Journal of Obesity 30.8: 1281–87. Wolf, Jacqueline H. 2006. “What Feminists Can Do for Breastfeeding and What Breastfeeding Can Do for Feminists.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31.2: 397–424.

Into the Mouths of Babes 63 Wolf, Joan B. 2007a. “Is Breast Really Best? Risk and Total Motherhood in the National Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign.” Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law 32.4: 595–636. Wolf, Joan B. 2007b. “Commentary–Rejoinder to Judy M. Hopkinson.” Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law 32.4: 649–54. World Health Organization. 2008. “Up to What Age Can a Baby Stay Well Nourished by Just Being Breastfed?” Accessed October 2, 2011. http://www.who.int/ features/qa/21/en/index.html. Zheng T., T. R. Holford, S. T. Mayne, P. H. Owens, Y. Zhang, B. Zhang, P. Boyle, and S. H. Zahm. 2001. “Lactation and Breast Cancer: A Case-Control Study in Connecticut.” British Journal of Cancer 84:1472–76.

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Tales from the Tit The Moral and Political Implications of Useless Lactational Suffering Lissa Skitolsky

INTRODUCTION As a mother, one of the best things that only you can do for your baby is to breastfeed. Breastfeeding is more than a lifestyle choice—it is an important health choice. Any amount of time that you can do it will help both you and your baby. While breastfeeding isn’t the only option for feeding your baby, every mother has the potential to succeed and make it a wonderful experience. Dive into our resources to fi nd out how breastfeeding can be one of the most important things you do for both you and your baby! (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, http://www.womenshealth.gov; emphasis added) For more than a decade American feminist scholars have focused attention on breastfeeding as a maternal practice shaped by relations of power that reflect larger social inequalities in the U.S., although they differ on how to ultimately regard the value of breastfeeding and breastfeeding advocacy.1 In these works, and virtually everywhere else, there is almost no discussion of the ethical, social, or political relevance of the physical pain that can be involved with breastfeeding. This elision of the pain often involved in breastfeeding reflects the patriarchal expectation that women suffer for the sake of their children and at the same time deny or silence the terms of that suffering. Often, maternal pain is viewed as a necessary sacrifice rather than a problem of what Emmanuel Levinas would call “useless suffering.” In his essay of the same name, Levinas presents a phenomenology of suffering that challenges certain preconceived ideas about the nature and meaning of suffering, namely, that suffering is either chosen or a punishment from God (Levinas 1988). Reflecting on the atrocities of the twentieth century, Levinas coins the term “useless suffering” to designate a type of harm that is neither chosen nor deserved and that forms the basis of our ethical obligation to the other. Is not the evil of suffering . . . also the unassumable and thus the possibility of a half opening, and, more precisely, the possibility that

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wherever a moan, a cry, a groan or a sigh happen there is the original call for aid, for curative help, for help from the other ego whose alterity, whose exteriority promises salvation? (Levinas 1988, 158) As William Edelglass succinctly states, “for Levinas, ethics is the compassionate response to the vulnerable, suffering Other” (2006). Adopting Levinas’s phrase, I will claim that we have a moral obligation to recognize the useless suffering that so many women experience in the effort to breastfeed and a corresponding obligation to attempt to alleviate that pain. We have failed to hear the “moan,” the “cry,” and the “groan” that sometimes accompanies breastfeeding for what they truly are: a call for aid and a demand for our intervention to help lessen the evil of maternal suffering. Within the current politics of breastfeeding in the U.S., the idea that breast milk offers significant health benefits to infants eclipses the frequent experience of pain that attends breastfeeding. In this chapter, I will argue that this disregard of maternal suffering emerges from a dilemma that both promotes an exclusionary model of motherhood and precludes a more widespread distribution of breast milk. The dilemma: either mothers breastfeed their own children or those children are unduly deprived of breast milk and all of its benefits. If mothers experience a considerable amount of pain, their decision to cease attempting to breastfeed might seem reasonable; however, in that decision a mother both relieves herself of pain and deprives her child of health and perhaps interpersonal benefits. What’s a mom to do? Ignore her pain to the benefit of her child or relieve her pain to the detriment of her child? This dilemma is imposed through our sociopolitical practices that simultaneously treat breast milk as a valuable product and limit that product—in production and in consumption—to members of a heterosexual, biological, nuclear family. Such an environment provides no socially sanctioned means by which nontraditional families may acquire breast milk for their infants. Further, this dilemma all but effaces the medical condition of mothers as a factor that ought to count toward determining whether or not they should breastfeed. This effacement is reinforced by the normalization of women’s suffering as a “natural” part of pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, and mothering, rather than a serious problem for women’s emotional and physical health. It is time we regard women’s suffering in the course of breastfeeding as useless, as a moral objection, which for Levinas is “unpardonable and solicits me and calls me” (1988, 159). Recognizing maternal suffering as useless rather than as a useful sacrifice may fi nally begin to provoke thought on alternative means to distribute breast milk in order to eradicate a mother’s pain in the course of her mothering. In a collection of stories titled Fresh Milk: The Secret Life of Breasts (2003), Fiona Giles provides a notable exception to the discursive erasure of maternal suffering in the act of breastfeeding. In the story “Hell Ride,” a woman recounts the physical ordeal she confronted in breastfeeding her

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second child. Giles introduces the story by reminding her readers that some women do not suffer any pain in the act of breastfeeding, thereby making it difficult for some to appreciate the anguish experienced by many others. She also reminds us of the psychological toll that such anguish can take, especially in relation to postpartum depression: It was so painful to breastfeed that I would get into a complete sweat whenever I knew it was time for Brenton to latch on. The cracked nipple was really severe and became infected, and then I got it in the other nipple, so I had cracks in both nipples. I was so desperate I phoned up every lactation consultant who was on standby in Sydney. I paid $250 to get someone to visit. She looked at my positioning and propped me up with more pillows, and she said, “Keep going, you’ll have to do it.” It was just agony. But I was very committed. I could really see the value—probably from my food industry background. I think it’s as good a start as a baby can ever get. But I resented the attitude. It’s a bit like they were saying to me, “This is what we have nipples for, and this is what we have breasts for, and that’s what we’re destined to do if we have children.” Everyone kept on reinforcing my view that it was the best thing for the baby. (Giles 2003, 85) This story illustrates the “breastfeeding dilemma”: The mother is torn between her desire to give her child breast milk and the extreme pain she feels in doing so. Either she tolerates intense pain or her child is deprived of milk; she is trapped in a double bind of pain or regret. Even more, her devotion is more to providing her child with breast milk than to breastfeeding; she appreciates the health benefits of breast milk but resents the unconditional force of the claim that mothers are supposed to breastfeed their children: “that’s what we’re destined to do if we have children.” Further, she describes her experience as an “agony” that caused her to sweat in anticipation, yet she continues both due to pressure from a lactation consultant and her own desire to provide her child with the vitamins and antibodies found in breast milk. This mother eventually overcame her ordeal, but this should not lead us to gloss the essential point: a mother’s agony should count as a contraindication for any act of mothering, including breastfeeding. Recognizing that a mother’s suffering should be taken seriously, as useless, is the fi rst step to undermining the dilemma. However, to make a real difference in mothers’ lives, to provide women with possible escape from or even a means of avoiding confronting the dilemma in the fi rst place, it is necessary to make a social practice of shared nursing, or “cross-nursing” and the expansion of milk banks, both of which could provide better options for mothers who work outside the home, adoptive parents, nontraditional families, and women who suffer intensely in attempting to nurse. Mothers should not have to endure agony in the act of mothering, and they should

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not be encouraged to endure excessive suffering in the act of breastfeeding. Parents and other caregivers should be able to provide infants with the nutrients and antibodies found in breast milk and should not have to suffer economically or physically to do so.

TALES FROM THE SUFFERING TIT Various views on the value of breastfeeding can be found in feminist scholarship; for example, consider the contrasting positions taken by Linda M. Blum in her book At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States (2000) and Bernice L. Hausman in her book Mother’s Milk: Breastfeeding Controversies in American Culture (2003). Both are skeptical of discourse that enthusiastically promotes breastfeeding and critical of the limited options presented to working mothers who wish to breastfeed. However, Hausman is less critical than Blum is of the medical discourse that promotes breast milk as the best option for new infants. Taking up her position in opposition to Blum, she explains that “biomedical discourses about breastfeeding’s health benefits cannot be disregarded in favor of a feminist perspective that focuses exclusively on political and ideological issues. Maternity, in my view, deserves to be understood as an embodied experience, and the unique embodiment of lactation should not be conceptualized as merely one kind of nutrition delivery system” (Hausman 2003, 218). Thus, for Hausman, we cannot regard breastfeeding as one option for early infant care that presents political, social, and ideological problems, but rather we must take it more seriously as an essential part of the “embodied experience” of maternity that presents crucial health benefits for infants. Neither Blum nor Hausman separate the question of breastfeeding from the question of breast milk; that is, both assume rather than problematize the breastfeeding dilemma: either mothers embrace the “embodied experience” of breastfeeding or their children are deprived of breast milk (which, according to Blum, may not be such a devastating deprivation). Departing from Hausman, I regard breastfeeding as one kind of delivery system for breast milk and, in agreement with biomedical discourses, view this milk as a precious commodity to which all should have access. I am not arguing that all parents should choose breast milk; rather, I argue that breast milk should be available to those who cannot or choose not to breastfeed. Neither Blum nor Hausman mention the medical conditions that prevent some women from breastfeeding, as if the choice to breastfeed were made entirely in accord with economic, social, emotional, or political considerations. They thereby become complicit in the erasure of women’s maternal suffering that has yielded a highly romanticized ideal of mothering that bears little resemblance to the work and pain involved in rearing children. Thus, it appears that even some feminists are uncomfortable confronting the possible correspondence

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between nurturing and suffering. My goal is to extend the focus from the politics of breastfeeding to the moral implications of maternal suffering that is often involved in the embodied practice of lactation. In fact, breastfeeding can lead to unbearable suffering for new mothers, who are vulnerable to infections such as mastitis and thrush, as well as to cracked and bleeding nipples, plugged milk ducts and abscesses. These conditions are often extremely painful and thrush, in particular—the outgrowth of yeast in the breasts—is often described as feeling like glass breaking inside the nipples or as more painful than labor. Yet this suffering is not recognized as a possible contraindication for breastfeeding but instead as a “natural” and “normal” part of the process. As the La Leche League website explains, “mothers have breastfed their babies through a variety of illnesses, from colds and infections to chronic conditions. . . . These mothers found creative solutions to enable them to continue breastfeeding while caring for their health” (La Leche League 2010). The expectation involved here, namely, that mothers’ suffering never outweighs the value of breast milk, simply neglects to take a mother’s suffering seriously and as something not inevitable. Women’s suffering in breastfeeding has been normalized due to cultural expectations that mothers should always place their children’s health ahead of their own and should alone assume complete responsibility for nurturing their children. The failure to separate the transmission of breast milk from the act of breastfeeding supports a model of motherhood that Blum refers to as “exclusive” (2000, 6), one based on the conviction that mothers should retain exclusive responsibility for nurturing their children. Breastfeeding is lauded in parenting literature as an essential bonding experience between mother and child, central for each to form an (exclusive) attachment to the other. This view confuses a descriptive claim about the nutritional benefit of breast milk (according to some, “essential” to an infant’s early health) with a normative claim about the proper relation between mother and child. If the price women pay for such “bonding” is their physical torment, then we ought to rethink the essential nature of this exclusive relationship and whether the resulting bond is really one we want to advocate or whether the bonding sought might be achievable by other means. Susan Maushart’s The Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming a Mother Changes Our Lives and Why We Never Talk about It (2000) presents another notable exception to the discursive disavowal of maternal suffering in the act of breastfeeding: Ordinary . . . women normally discover in the course of things . . . that they have been given a hopelessly sanitized version of the physical travails involved in normal breast feeding. The first thing that has been censored is pain, which is not to be confused with “minor discomfort” or “a slight ache” or any of the other euphemisms routinely adopted. Even the word “suck” is a misnomer. “Clamp down” is more accurate, as every woman who has ever curled her toes during an early attempt at “attachment” can

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attest. The force of a baby’s gums in action is astoundingly disproportionate to its size and putative helplessness. Even if there is no cracking, bruising, or blistering of nipples (all of which we are led to believe are unusual conditions, and none of which is), the first few weeks of “attachment” can be quite gruesomely painful. (Maushart 2000, 157) Maushart points out that the discourse surrounding breastfeeding both disavows and minimizes the pain involved: the act of “attachment” between infant and breast is neither easy nor immediate; the “sucking” is really a form of wounding, and it often leads, not to “discomfort,” but to excruciating pain. Maushart connects this erasure of maternal pain with the general trend where studies of breastfeeding focus entirely on the condition of the child to the exclusion of the mother’s experience: Studies of the psychology of breast feeding have tended to focus almost exclusively on the relationship of the child to the breast, while the responses of the person to whom that breast happens to be appended have been taken for granted or ignored outright . . . our understanding of the emotional realities of breast feeding continues to be naïvely unilinear. We are very, very interested in the impact of breast feeding on babies, yet have hardly taken notice at all (except in the most one-dimensional and highly sentimentalized terms) of its impact on mothers. This remains unexamined and unremarked. (Maushart 2000, 160) The literature about breastfeeding more or less ignores the psychological and physical experience of mothers as they struggle to provide milk and, as a result, their suffering in the act of lactating has become a normal and so “unexamined” and “unremarked” phenomenon. To counteract this longstanding trend, we must foreground the potential for pain in our discussion of the benefits and risks of breastfeeding, and we need to regard pain itself as a real counterindication for lactation. We also need to dissociate breastfeeding from the transmission of breast milk so that women are not coerced into an agonizing experience by a socially induced dilemma. It is clear that if we take maternal suffering seriously as a problem in desperate need of a solution, then we must offer more options for early infant care. I will now briefly consider cross-nursing and the use of milk banks as two currently undervalued social practices in Western culture that could radically transform maternal embodiment and serve to shatter the breastfeeding dilemma.

THE REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS OF CROSS-NURSING So Boaz married Ruth; she became his wife, and he cohabited with her. The Lord let her conceive, and she bore a son. And the women said to

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As the above passage from the book of Ruth makes clear, “cross-” or “shared nursing”—where women share the task of breastfeeding one another’s children—is an ancient practice. Naomi took her (former) daughter-in-law’s child to her breast and by that act became its “foster mother.” The text does not elaborate on why Naomi nursed Ruth’s child, and we are left to consider the act as one more sign of their strong and enduring friendship. Alternatively, we could view this act of cross-nursing as an act of bonding between Naomi and a child who the Lord claimed would sustain her in old age. In this way, the act serves both to solidify friendship between women and to foster extrafamilial, intergenerational bonds. This practice of sharing breast milk (and maternal work) is just as old as the more controversial practice of “wet-nursing” that became a common practice in Europe and North America between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Given that cross-nursing is an ancient practice still common in many non-Western cultures, it is important to ask why it caused an international uproar in 2009 when the movie star Salma Hayek decided to breastfeed the child of another woman while touring a hospital in Sierra Leone. Judging by the extent of the U.S. press coverage and the mixed reactions her act provoked, it is clear that American women were simultaneously impressed and shocked by her willingness to breastfeed a child whose mother, it was reported, was simply unable to provide milk for her one-week-old son. The public outcry focused entirely on Hayek’s willingness to lend her breasts to another child; no one inquired about the medical condition of the mother who was captured on film watching Hayek breastfeed her child. The predominant concern about cross-nursing expressed by the medical community and breastfeeding advocacy groups such as La Leche League is the danger that certain infectious diseases such as HIV can be passed through breast milk. However, this concern was not voiced in any of the mixed reactions to Hayek’s decision, presumably because people assumed that Hayek did not have any such disease that could be passed through breastfeeding. What, then, was the source of the outcry? Although the negative reactions to Hayek’s act did not elaborate on why it was thought to be “disgusting” or “just wrong,” I suspect that her decision to breastfeed another child was controversial for two primary reasons: (1) Hayek disrupted the cultural norm of exclusive motherhood, and (2) she offered a real alternative to it that could revolutionize the way we nurture our children.

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In this section, my focus will be on the revolutionary potential of cross-nursing as a practice that could undermine the model of exclusive motherhood on which our objection to such a practice rests. Although a consideration of wet-nursing is beyond the scope of this chapter, it could conceivably be readopted on more egalitarian and less exploitative grounds than its historical practice would suggest. Cross-nursing is distinguished from wet-nursing by the fact that it is typically an informal and reciprocal, rather than contractual and (potentially) exploitative arrangement, where women feed each other’s infants if and when “a situation of desire or need arises” (Shaw 2007, 442). Whether or not Hayek meant to advocate this practice, her act of spontaneously taking another child to her breast presents an image that disturbs norms of maternity. Although cross-nursing is not thought to be a common practice in the U.S., there is no way to know how many informal communities of women do indeed breastfeed one another’s children. And although American feminist scholars have not theorized the revolutionary potential of cross-nursing, it has been recommended by British breastfeeding advocate Gabrielle Palmer as “a unique opportunity for solidarity and friendship among women” (Blum 2000, 41) and theorized by New Zealander feminist scholar Rhonda Shaw in two groundbreaking articles on the topic. In her fi rst article, “The Virtues of Cross-Nursing and the ‘Yuk Factor’” (2004), Shaw draws attention to the extended maternal embodiment enacted by cross-nursing as well as to its potential to radically transform maternal practice in Western culture: Women who participate in cross-nursing share the work of nourishing an infant that is usually reserved for one woman. In particular, this woman is commonly the bio-genetic mother. Hence, women who engage in cross-nursing practices extend the boundaries of social maternity beyond unitary interpretations of genetic/ chromosomal and uterine/gestational motherhood. Because cross-nursing arrangements challenge the limits of the private mother/child bond or relationship, and the corresponding moral requirement that a mother’s work be done in isolation from other women, they expose—among other things—the ethos of motherhood that underpins dominant (racialised and classbased) ideologies of the family in Western culture. In the context of white, Western, heterosexual, biological motherhood, cross-nursing lays bare alternative possibilities for maternal practice. For some people, this issues a direct challenge to the perceived sacrosanct wholeness of the kind of motherhood that authorizes private and individualist constructions of maternal identity. (Shaw 2004, 288) Shaw associates the “private and individualist construction” of maternal identity with the ideal bodies of quintessential liberal political subjects that “are required to be individuated, bounded, and closed” (2004, 287). Such

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an identity has always been restricted to those who could afford or sustain it; namely, white, heterosexual, middle-class mothers. Working-class mothers have always had to embrace creative solutions for child care that extend maternal responsibility beyond the biological mother, and homosexual families already parent outside of the traditional categories of the exclusive “mother” and “father” dyad. She suggests that greater social acceptance of cross-nursing, which extends “the boundaries of social maternity,” could disrupt that Western ideal of the individualist or exclusive model of maternity that places the entire burden of a child’s care on the back—or breasts—of its biological mother. Feminists have long advocated for a more distributed child care framework to relieve the burden of mothers but have only recently recognized that our conception of maternity is tied to our conception of breastfeeding; what is currently viewed as a private act of nourishment that strengthens and sanctifies the mother-child bond should, instead, be viewed as a potentially communal effort that widens the responsibility of maternity and strengthens and sanctifies the community bonds with mothers and children. This would provide children with the benefits of learning to trust multiple caretakers and knowing fi rsthand an ethical community based on reciprocal, caring relations forged for the sake of our well-being and nourishment. In order to demonstrate the communal potential of cross-nursing, Shaw interviewed twelve New Zealand women who had, at one time, crossnursed. She draws from these interviews to explain the ethical dimension of cross-nursing in terms of an extended embodiment: “In one way or another, these women’s statements suggest that demonstrating one’s humanity entails having corporeal openings out to other beings. And it is precisely these sorts of openings, generously enacted in the mundane course of our everyday lives, that these women believe make us both social and human” (2004, 296). For Shaw, cross-nursing “challenges the invisibility of intercorporeal existence and identity” and confi rms Merleau-Ponty’s observation that “one’s identity is formed and immersed in the lived bodies of others’ identities” (Shaw 2004, 287). If cross-nursing exposes the intercorporeal reality of lived experience, then it also undermines the model of exclusive motherhood that depends upon an image of closed, bounded, individual maternal agents who retain exclusive responsibility for the wellbeing of their children. Insofar as cross-nursing—the informal and reciprocal exchange of bodily fluids—enacts an extended maternal embodiment beyond the mother-child dyad, it disrupts the very model of maternity that leads us to be repulsed by the practice or to view it as taboo. In her second article, “Cross-Nursing, Ethics, and Giving Breast Milk in the Contemporary Context” (2007), Shaw debunks many of the myths surrounding cross-nursing, such as the presumption that it creates psychological confusion for infants who are breast-fed by more than one woman. On the contrary, “documented cross-nursing cases indicate no apparent

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psychological harms to cross-nursed infants” (Shaw 2007, 440). I would venture to guess that our presumption that infants are “confused” in the course of cross-nursing stems from the projection of our own confusion about maternal boundaries. Shaw also analyzes the logic of reciprocity that informs cross-nursing in terms of a gift economy, as she fi nds that “unlike historical accounts of wet nursing, mutual gift giving is generally involved with these kinds of cross-nursing acts or arrangements” (2007, 444). A gift economy is based on asymmetrical or equivalent reciprocity between the parties involved rather than a formal contract. As Shaw explains, “crossnursing . . . designates an informal, potentially two-way, non-monetary arrangement in which women feed each other’s infants if, and when, a situation of desire or need arises” (2007, 442). It is often a spontaneous arrangement based on trust, support, mutual empowerment, and generosity (Shaw 2004, 288). Just as caregiving is a fluid practice that doesn’t easily conform to a standard set of assumptions or rules, so too cross-nursing should be viewed as a fluid practice that takes shape in the course of a caregiving arrangement. The logic of gift giving need not be the only way to understand the transmission of breast milk, but it does illuminate the ethical dimension of cross-nursing. In her book Fresh Milk, Giles includes the story of an Australian woman who cross-nursed with other lactating women who watched one another’s kids. She recalls her positive feelings about the experience: Being part of that group in Darwin, it felt like there was more than one mother for any child in the community. To be able to feed another woman’s child made me feel that between us all, there was a tribe there somewhere. I felt like a part of that tribe, rather than being bonded to any one baby I’d nursed. We were just part of a community, held in a container of all of us. (Giles 2003, 27) The practice of cross-nursing has the potential to transform a population of isolated lactating women into a tribe in which each member gathers strength and help from the others through the travails of breastfeeding. Such a shift in maternal practice would entail relations less vulnerable to exploitation insofar as they emerge from a gift economy, rather than a capitalist economy; here mothers share the burden of maternal work in order to lighten the load for one another. It thoroughly undermines the dilemma of breastfeeding, for here it is not the case that either a mother feeds her own child or that child is deprived of breast milk. Instead, any particular child has more than one source for breast milk. Although cross-nursing currently is an informal arrangement between friends and family members, it could become a formal arrangement facilitated by hospitals and breastfeeding advocacy groups. In this way certain anticipated problems—such as the spread of infectious diseases or the transmission of alcohol or drugs into the breast milk—could be avoided

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with formal testing procedures. In replacing the model of exclusive motherhood with the model of the “tribe,” cross-nursing also disrupts the breastfeeding dilemma insofar as such a community could allow mothers more time and energy to attend to certain painful conditions that arise as a result of lactating. In this sense cross-nursing could also facilitate the effort to better attend to women’s health while they breastfeed.

PUMPING AND SELLING: THE ETHICS OF MILK BANKS Milk selling proved, in fact, to be a rather brief career opportunity for women, lasting perhaps sixty years—from the opening of the fi rst milk collection service in 1910 to the 1970s, when milk banks grew in number and became places where women could go to donate milk. (Golden 2001, 202) In the historical interstice between the decline of wet-nursing and the popularity of infant formula in the United States, there arose a series of milk banks that paid women for their breast milk and distributed it to new mothers. In her book A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle (2001), Janet Golden reports that the fi rst milk bank opened in America in 1910 at the Boston Floating Hospital (193), and that by 1929 there were milk banks in at least twenty American cities (200). Further, she claims that around this time breast milk became a commodity that women sold to make a living: “According to public-health nurses working in the various milk banks around the country, payments ranged from twentyfive to one hundred dollars a month” (196). As formula-feeding became more socially acceptable, new employment opportunities opened up for women, and as new concerns were raised about the ethics of selling one’s milk to needy infants, milk banks ceased to pay lactating women for their breast milk (Golden 2001, 203–4). Instead, they began to rely on milk donated by middle-class mothers. The decline in the use and popularity of milk banks continued in the 1980s as concern over AIDS and the need for more complex screening procedures for donors caused many banks to close. According to the website of the Human Milk Banking Association of North America, by the end of the 1980s there were only about eight or nine donor milk banks left in North America. Golden argues that the decline of milk banks was related to a shift in the common perception of breast milk from a commodity to a gift or, as Giles states, from a commodity to a “sacred substance given from the heart” (2003, 49). Golden explains that “it is no longer a commodity sold by working-class women, but has become, instead, a gift. And it is given not in the expectation of reciprocity, but as part of a ‘moral transaction’ encompassing late twentieth-century perceptions of infancy, mothering, economy, and society” (2001, 201). This perception of breast milk—a

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bodily fluid—as a “gift” or sacred substance that is charitably given overlooks the fact that lactating is, in fact, a tremendous amount of work. As Cindy Stearns explains in her article “Breastfeeding and the Good Maternal Body,” “breastfeeding is work; work that is not shared and work that is rendered invisible by the way it is required to be hidden” (1999, 323). Women ought to have the option of being paid for this work, and breast milk—which provides tremendous health benefits to infants—ought to be (re)acknowledged as a precious commodity. In this sense, the distribution and sale of breast milk is no different than the distribution of blood or the sale of sperm to sperm banks; in each case a bodily fluid that is central to our growth and well-being is regarded as a commodity that can be bought and sold. This system benefits all involved. If the medical discourse is right and breast milk really is such a valuable resource for infants, it ought to be treated as a commodity that is readily available and distributed through means that assure its safety. There are currently ten nonprofit milk banks in the U.S. which follow the standards set by the Human Milk Banking Association of North America (HMBANA), established in 1985. All of these milk banks rely on donated breast milk from lactating women that is screened, pasteurized, stored in freezers, and distributed to hospitals to feed premature and sick infants. Milk banks screen potential donors for communicable diseases and health behaviors, similarly to the way blood banks screen donors. In addition, those who smoke or take regular medication are not eligible to give milk, and it is forbidden to consume alcohol within a twelve-hour period before milk donation. A small amount of donated milk is available to buy for mothers who, for one reason or another, cannot provide breast milk to their newborns. However, all outpatient orders require a doctor’s prescription and a letter of medical necessity. Further, the milk is expensive: it ranges anywhere from $3 to $5 dollars for a single ounce, amounting to around $100 for a day’s supply (Block 2010). Thus, women who choose not to breastfeed or are unable to breastfeed do not have the (real) option of buying donated milk from a milk bank. Here, we see the breastfeeding dilemma again: either a mother breastfeeds her own child or that child is deprived of breast milk. Several major media outlets just reported on the creation of a new Facebook site called “Eats on Feets,” through which women have been sharing breast milk. It was perhaps inevitable that women would find a means of sharing their breast milk through social media in order to compensate for the deprivation of this milk from working mothers, nontraditional families, and women with problems nursing. This deprivation is itself a necessary condition for the social, political, and economic enforcement of the heteronormative maternal ideal, by which some children are given advantages that positively affect their growth and others deemed “abnormal” are deprived of these same advantages. The creator of the site, Emma Kwasnica, is a Montreal-based mother and breastfeeding activist who considers the online community of

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milk-sharing women as a form of “lactivism” (Block 2010). Time magazine reports that in a just a few weeks “the network has grown to 98 local groups, spanning all 50 states in the U.S. and 22 countries. More than 70 matches have been reported so far, with milk coming not only in bags and jars, but also sometimes directly from the source” (Block 2010). In her article “Move Over, Milk Banks: Facebook and Milk Sharing” (2010), Jennifer Block reports that women have turned to the site because milk banks cannot currently service the need of working mothers and those who, for one reason or another, cannot provide breast milk. Because milk sharing is a new, radical maternal practice, we need to adjust our social and economic practices to allow room for it to develop in a safe and healthy way. If women were paid for their breast milk, there would most likely be a far greater amount of milk. And if it were possible, not just for new mothers, but for all parents of newborns to buy breast milk as a less-expensive option than baby formula, then the breastfeeding dilemma would be undermined. Women would not be faced with a stark choice between breastfeeding or depriving their children of breast milk. In the process, nontraditional families would be validated, undermining the heteronormative model of exclusive motherhood that demands more of women than of men. All children deserve the same health benefits as children in heterosexual nuclear middle-class families. Some will object to women profiting from a natural capacity associated with maternal practice; others will say it’s “just wrong” for women to give their milk to babies who are not their own. However, breast milk is in fact a valuable commodity. Giles reports that the economist Julie Smith has calculated the economic value of breast milk at approximately $50 per liter (Giles 2003, 66). Giles also reports that Norway is the only country to include human milk output in its annual reports on national food production (2003, 66). This is a step in the right direction, for we need to regard breast milk, not as a sacred substance, but as a valuable food source that contains inestimable health benefits for infants. Women should retain the option of sharing or selling it as they see fit. The expansion of milk banks remains a better option for facilitating breast milk exchange than informal online communities, insofar as they have formal screening procedures in place. We simply need more of them, and we need to recognize again the economic value of women’s work and pay women for their breast milk. Although we may legitimately raise concerns about the possible exploitation of low-income women who would pump milk (even if painful) for those who could afford to buy it, it is also possible to guarantee both a fair wage and medical treatment for those women who would choose to sell their breast milk.

CONCLUSION We need to rethink the act of breastfeeding in its physical, social, economic, medical, and moral dimensions in order to displace the model of

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exclusive motherhood that still binds women to excessive suffering in the act of nurturing. The breastfeeding dilemma supports this model insofar as it assumes that a mother bears the entire responsibility for providing breast milk to her own child: either mothers breastfeed their children or their children are deprived of breast milk. It is a false dilemma that reinforces the heterosexist, classist ideal of maternity as an “individuated, bounded, and closed” experience (Shaw 2004, 287). In order to disrupt this dilemma we need to conceptually separate the transmission of breast milk from the act of breastfeeding. This entails the creation and perpetuation of alternative maternal practices such as cross-nursing and milk banking that provide means for the exchange and distribution of breast milk. All parents of infants deserve the option to provide breast milk, and assuming contemporary scientific discourse is accurate, all children deserve to reap the benefits of breast milk; mothers should not have to suffer unnecessarily in the process, and children should not be deprived unnecessarily. I have argued that both the suffering and the deprivation can sometimes be alleviated. First and foremost, we need to regard the sometimes excruciating pain in the act of breastfeeding as useless suffering. NOTES 1. See especially Pam Carter, Feminism, Breasts and Breastfeeding (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995); Naomi Baumslag and Dia L. Michels, Milk, Money and Madness: The Culture and Politics of Breastfeeding (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 1995); Linda M. Blum, At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States (Boston: Beacon, 1999); Janet Golden, A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001); Bernice L. Hausman, Mother’s Milk: Breastfeeding Controversies in American Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003); Fiona Giles, Fresh Milk: The Secret Life of Breasts (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003).

WORKS CITED Block, Jennifer. 2010. “Move Over, Milk Banks: Facebook and Milk Sharing.” Time.com, November 22. Accessed December 24, 2010. http://www.time.com/ time/health/article/0,8599,2032363,00.html. Blum, Linda M. 2000. At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States. Boston: Beacon. Edelglass, William. 2006. “Levinas on Suffering and Compassion.” Sophia 45.2: 39–55. Giles, Fiona. 2003. Fresh Milk: The Secret Life of Breasts. New York: Simon and Schuster. Golden, Janet. 2001. A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Hausman, Bernice L. 2003. Mother’s Milk: Breastfeeding Controversies in American Culture. New York: Routledge.

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Jewish Publication Society. 1999. JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh: The Traditional Hebrew Text and the New JPS Translation. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Author. La Leche League. 2010. Accessed December 23, 2010. http://www.llli.org. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1988. “Useless Suffering.” Trans. Richard Cohen. In The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood, 156–65. New York: Routledge. Maushart, Susan. 2000. The Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming a Mother Changes Our Lives and Why We Never Talk about It. New York: Penguin. Shaw, Rhonda. 2004. “The Virtues of Cross-Nursing and the ‘Yuk Factor.’” Australian Feminist Studies 19.45: 287–99. . 2007. “Cross-Nursing, Ethics, and Giving Breast Milk in the Contemporary Context.” Women’s Studies International Forum 30:439–50.

5

Motherhood and the Workings of Disgust Sherri Irvin

INTRODUCTION Let’s face it: babies and small children are disgusting. They ooze from every orifice, and these various oozings often blend with each other and with other substances to form a stinky, gooey, slimy stew. When I pick up my child from day care, his face is often encrusted with a blend of sand, saliva, and snot. A suboptimal diaper installation results in a trail of poopy footprints that can be traced back up the shoe, sock, and leg directly to the source. The morning after an undetected overnight vomiting episode, the toddler, quite unperturbed, is covered from head to foot. The only thing that annoys him about the whole affair is the bath that restores him to a presentable state.1 The fact that they themselves are not disgusted by anything is part of what makes small children disgusting. Last summer in the backyard my son joyously harvested pears in various stages of decay, typically made available by snacking squirrels who would take a few nibbles and then toss them to the ground. My son would invariably go for the spot the squirrel had bitten, because otherwise his new teeth had trouble breaking the pear’s skin. Once he found a pear that met his approval, he would carry it with him, snacking periodically, the whole day. He was not yet walking, so the pear, well seasoned with dirt, was an accessory to his crawling. And yet, have I ever felt disgusted by my child? I have sometimes noticed things about him that others might fi nd disgusting. But even after prewashing hundreds (thousands? let’s not do the computation) of cloth diapers in the toilet over a period of many months, even after stripping a bed full of last night’s half-digested dinner and wiping down the crib rails and walls, even after countless kisses marinated in sand and snot, I see my child as essentially, radiantly pure. Imagining any of these situations before his birth, I would have expected disgust to figure saliently in my reaction. And even now, I feel disgust on encountering any snot- or vomit-encrusted child other than my own. For me, at least, part of maternal love is that it neutralizes my sense of contamination or pollution in relation to him; or perhaps it causes me to see my

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child himself as neutralizing contaminants or pollutants: my sense of him as radiantly pure, to repeat the expression I used before, is an almost literal sense that he radiates purity. In this chapter, I will explore the workings of disgust, considering two interrelated ways in which it functions in motherhood. First, motherhood demands an evolution in a mother’s sense of disgust: this evolution serves both to make the experience of mothering tolerable and to promote intimacy and important forms of knowledge. This process of evolution reveals disgust to be a situated response that can shift in a way that is appropriately sensitive to the elements of a new context. Second, motherhood makes very salient the way in which people use responses of disgust to enforce, and to justify the enforcement of, social norms. If I take my child directly from an afternoon of outdoor play at day care to the grocery store without changing his clothes, I am subject to the raised eyebrows or downright dirty looks of other shoppers. It appears that mothers are differentially subjected to such treatment: fathers are less likely to be targeted by others’ expressions of disgust. These two aspects of the functioning of disgust are interrelated. Just as the mother experiences an appropriate relaxation of her sense of disgust that allows her to nurture her child while accepting the child’s healthy, natural behaviors and bodily functions, the disgust of others serves to ratchet up social expectations and enforcement of norms regarding the “good” mother. If the mother acquiesces, she must be continually engaged in monitoring and tidying her child, which may interfere with the child’s exploration of the world (while also sending the message that the child is not acceptable as he or she is). If she does not, she is subject to ongoing signs, implicit and explicit, that she is flawed or failing as a mother. The workings of disgust are, thus, a mechanism through which the oppression of women is maintained. Before continuing, I should acknowledge that my personal experiences, which played a central role in generating these reflections, are limited; my only child is scarcely two years old as I write, and no doubt there would be more and different things to say about this topic if he were older. Also, I am only one person, and I strongly suspect that the temperaments of both mother and child shape the way in which these phenomena are realized in a particular relationship. I will explore this issue further in the following text. Finally, as an anonymous reviewer of this volume has mentioned, the social regulating function of disgust and distaste likely plays an even stronger role for mothers of children with disabilities, with these mothers experiencing greater stress as a result. I should also say something about how I understand the notion of motherhood. In this chapter, I will treat the word “mother” as referring to a parent, whether biological or adoptive, who identifies as a woman. Some of my discussion relates to the act of breastfeeding, and thus will be relevant only to the situation of mothers who are biologically female (and primarily,

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although not exclusively, to those who are the biological mothers of the infants whom they are nursing). 2 Much of the discussion, however, pertains to the way in which mothers differentially internalize and are subjected to societal disgust responses, and this applies to all mothers.3

INTIMACY AND KNOWLEDGE One consequence of the suspension of disgust is straightforwardly positive; it allows me to embrace my child without reluctance or hesitation under virtually any circumstances. My delight in him and his antics is unmitigated, and I am able to participate in his delight at exploring the world and ingest, sometimes literally, the bits of it he offers up to me. My openness surprises even me: did I really just eat that piece of food—which had already been in my baby’s mouth and on the floor, perhaps not in that order—out of my baby’s gooey fi ngers, because he offered it to me with such glee? Yes, I did. In addition to the fact that it promotes intimacy between us, the relaxation of my disgust response enables me to allow my child to explore his world in ways that come naturally to him, especially orally. It greatly reduces the extent to which I feel moved to regulate his behavior, to hold him back, to engage in wincing hypervigilance. My suspension of disgust comes with costs to me. I am almost certainly exposed to more illnesses than I would be if I were squeamish about my child’s bodily extrusions. But this cost seems worth the intimacy of my connection to him. Moreover, I suspect that my tendency to suffer from his illnesses promotes his well-being: by feeling the same symptoms he is feeling, when he is too young to be able to verbalize their nature, I am better able to empathize with his distress and to assess whether treatment is needed. I think it is true in other instances, too, that the suspension of disgust promotes not just emotional intimacy but knowledge.4 Our household’s cloth-diapering practices involved a daily ritual of prewashing the diapers; and this was a way in which, late at night after my child had gone to sleep, I had a genuine, physical connection to him. I was literally in touch with what was going on in his body. I knew what he had eaten at day care, and I could read sickness from the smell and texture of his shit. Disgust is a barrier, and the breaking down of this barrier is both constitutive and symptomatic of an enmeshed relationship between mother and child. If this is right, it makes sense to expect that as my child grows up, and the level of enmeshment that is appropriate diminishes, my disgust response will rebound to some extent. Indeed, that already seems to be happening to a limited extent: I no longer dump the remains of his breakfast cereal into my own bowl, and I wipe his mouth and make sure he has swallowed his food before I let him drink from my glass.

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One might think this diminished disgust has to do with the incorporation of the infant into the self or with seeing the infant as part of the self. 5 However, this description doesn’t capture my experience. It doesn’t disgust me when my child eats a pear that has been dragged on the ground all day, but when I think of eating it, I am disgusted. He thus has not been assimilated to me. This is why I described him earlier as radiating purity: he does not seem susceptible to contamination by the things that I would regard as potentially contaminating to me. I have wondered if this is a failure of empathy on my part. If I am disgusted by the thought of eating something, shouldn’t the thought of my child’s eating it disgust me just as much, if not more? But there are other things that seem, quite legitimately, to escape this emotional logic, baby food and breast milk, for instance. The thought of consuming my own breast milk disgusts me, and I am not alone in this;6 but at the same time, for months I saw it as the healthiest of foods for my child.

DISGUST, COGNITION, AND TEMPERAMENT William Ian Miller describes the suspension of disgust in parenting as a form of effortful self-overcoming (1997, 134–36). This has not been my experience. I have never had to actively suppress or force myself to ignore or overcome a disgust response, except in rare instances of illness, where the stimulus—say, vomit full of half-digested food—was unusual (especially in its olfactory properties) and demanded special attentiveness and response due to the possibility that it indicated serious illness. Miller briefly notes that the role of disgust in mothering has traditionally been quite different from that in fathering; the mother has been expected to do the dirty work from which the father is protected (1997, 134). Perhaps it was the awareness that he was occupying a role to whose disgusting aspects he would, as a man, traditionally have been immune that made Miller’s own experience of disgust in response to his child’s bodily substances more acute. I assume there are a number of individual differences in cognition and temperament that play a role in the suspension of disgust.7 I’m sure some readers, both parents and nonparents, cringed at my description of allowing my child to eat pears chewed on and hurled to the ground by the neighborhood squirrels. The suspension of my disgust in this instance is facilitated by specific beliefs. I believe that exposure to a wide variety of microorganisms, especially those found in dirt, promotes successful immune system development;8 that holding and manipulating objects in the mouth promotes the young child’s understanding of the physical world;9 and that, where circumstances permit, it is best for a child to be able to explore the world openly, without constant admonitions and prohibitions. Were it not for these beliefs, perhaps my disgust response would have remained intact.

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Temperament is also very important, I expect. I have never been particularly squeamish; in fact, in some ways I am turned on by things at the boundary of the disgusting. When I discovered Lechevalier Mailloux, an exquisite raw-milk cheese made in Quebec, I was well aware that its attraction for me had something to do with its olfactory proximity to feces.10 Perhaps my ability to suspend disgust is related to my ability, in the case of the cheese, to harness the energy of disgust as constitutive of a form of pleasure, although it doesn’t seem to be the same phenomenon.11 When I enjoy snotty kisses or eat a bite of food soggy from my child’s mouth, my pleasure does not seem to depend on or be enhanced by a transfigured disgust response; it seems, instead, to be a different sort of pleasure for which disgust, had it not been (largely) suspended, would have served as an obstacle. That is, my pleasure is in a loving encounter with my child, and it is not enhanced by the snottiness of the kiss or the sogginess of the food (in contrast to the case of the cheese, where it is precisely the fecal odor as such that contributes to my exquisite experience). Another relevant aspect of my temperament is intertwined with cognition. I am not particularly risk averse. I don’t believe I can protect my child from everything, and I tend to think the attempt to protect children from too much carries a variety of risks of its own. Risk management is surely a fundamental element of disgust. Disgust primes us to avoid things that pose a potential threat.12 Beliefs about what is risky and a general temperamental orientation regarding risk, then, may be expected to shape disgust responses. It has to be said, however, that there are many things I fi nd disgusting from my own perspective, although I do not believe they are in any way harmful: the mixture of milk and orange juice, my child’s favorite beverage, is just one of many examples.

SOCIAL CONTROL As I’ve discussed, the suspension of my disgust response has been valuable in promoting intimacy with my child, knowledge about the functioning of his body, and a parenting style not characterized by excessive vigilance. It also, however, makes me unruly as an occupant of public space. Although spit-up is no longer a staple of my wardrobe, I still can’t be trusted to leave the house without a deposit of snot on my shoulder. Not normally given to exhibitionism, I didn’t hesitate to lift my shirt in public when my child was breastfeeding. I have been known to change his dirty diaper in full view of others at the local park, and to take him to the grocery store showing all the signs of the vigorous mud play that occupied his afternoon at day care. Worst of all, I can’t be relied on to prevent him from eating chunks of muffi n off the floor of the café. This unruliness can be disturbing to others, particularly to nonparents who lack the experience of accommodating the rhythms of life to the

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realities of infancy, but also to parents who draw the lines of risk in different places or who are heavily invested in maintaining decorum. And this disturbance is often expressed as disgust, with its characteristic “nose wrinkle” and “retraction of the upper lip” (Rozin et al. 2008, 759). Does this matter? Why not simply ignore dirty looks that emerge out of a perspective that one rejects, that is founded on ignorance, or that isn’t sufficiently responsive to the situation at hand? Of course, disregarding such responses is a central element of mothering in public. I know that some people are made uncomfortable by my decision to breastfeed at Target, but I do it anyway because I believe that breastfeeding is a normal, natural activity that should not have to be hidden. But to disregard these responses is not to be unaware of or unstung by them. A sneer of disgust is quite different from an expression of annoyance. If I come to realize that my behavior is annoying someone, I can simply cease the behavior. Disgust, although perhaps triggered by an offending behavior, often takes the person rather than the behavior as its principal target. To be disgusted is to see the target of disgust as contaminated, and there is no quick behavioral fi x for contamination. Moreover, annoyance is a sentiment that can be expressed among equals. When I ask someone to stop mindlessly tapping their pen on the table or simply shoot them an irritated look, I am not thereby implying they are inferior to me. Indeed, to express annoyance in this way is often to convey an expectation that they will be responsive to my concerns, that they are sufficiently civilized as to care about the preferences of others (although they may be guilty of temporary neglect). To be disgusted by another person, however, does appear centrally to involve seeing her as degraded, as occupying a lower status, perhaps irretrievably.13 The conditions productive of disgust are signs that she has not sufficiently internalized the norms of civilized society; she is either ignorant of or indifferent to them, and either of these, in an adult, is a sign that she suffers from a rather serious, even morally laden defect. I have used the word “civilized” to describe the state of internalizing social norms and being responsive to the preferences of others that is violated by the person who is judged disgusting. This is not my coinage. “Civilization,” writes Miller, in explicating the views of Norbert Elias, “requires the lowering of the thresholds of disgust and embarrassment, that is, it requires the easier triggering of these emotions” (1997, 172). As a society is civilized, behaviors that could once be performed in public must be relocated into private space (Miller 1997, 177). The breast that nourishes the infant (and the infant along with it) must be hidden beneath a “nursing drape,” and the child dirty from play must be whisked home from day care for a bath and change of clothes before being allowed into public space. A failure to adhere to these norms, and to feel the disgust that would motivate adherence, marks a mother as uncivilized.

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But the situation is, of course, more complicated than this. It’s not that the mother never internalized these norms; instead, a disgust response that was previously well established has relaxed, and she has adjusted—by the lights of civilized society, lowered—her standards. She remains fully aware of the norms and of the force they hold for others; rather than being oblivious to others’ expressions of disgust, she steels herself against them. To internalize the norms of civilized society is to be susceptible to shame when one is the object of others’ disgust. In my own experience, my shame response remained fully operative even as my disgust response relaxed. If I had to do the sort of effortful overcoming Miller describes, it was not disgust but shame that I had to overcome; and this overcoming was at most partial. I remain keenly aware of disapproving gazes even as I affect indifference, and this exacts an emotional toll that is compounded by the stress and lack of sleep that already characterize my condition as a mother. The consequences of being the object of others’ disgust are not only emotional; they also involve material constraints. The mere fact that most people believe a behavior is disgusting has been repeatedly advanced as a reason to make the behavior illegal.14 Although breastfeeding in public has not been prohibited in any U.S. jurisdiction, this has not prevented women from suffering penalties.15 In October 2006, a family was removed from an airplane and forced to delay travel until the following day because a mother’s breastfeeding was regarded as offensive by a flight attendant. In 2003, another set of parents lost custody of their children for six months and were arrested and charged with “sexual performance of a child,” a felony carrying a penalty of up to twenty years’ imprisonment, after a technician who processed a photo of the mother breastfeeding her one-year-old contacted Child Protective Services.16 Other sorts of consequence may be less readily quantifiable, but still pernicious. Terrence Des Pres suggests than when people are regarded with disgust, they are more likely to be seen as suitable objects of mistreatment. To prevent people from washing or using the toilet dehumanizes them in the eyes of others as well as in their own eyes, making them more vulnerable to abuse and less likely to vigorously resist it.17 If a mother is regarded with disgust, this may make her vulnerable to judgments, whether implicit or explicit, that she is less worthy of dignity and respect; she may even come to feel this way about herself.18

MOTHERING AND FATHERING I have been speaking of mothers throughout this chapter. But is there any reason to think that the phenomena under discussion are more applicable to mothers than to fathers? When it comes to the suspension of disgust, I am reluctant to generalize; as I have said, there are surely individual differences, and any anecdotal evidence I might collect could easily be skewed.

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To substantiate claims about gender differences would require empirical methods that are not in my philosopher’s toolkit.19 When it comes to the role of disgust in social control, however, there are good reasons to expect that fathers will be less susceptible to its pernicious effects. Of course, there is the fact that fathers do not breastfeed and that mothers continue to do much more of the total childcare labor than fathers in contemporary society. Mothers will thus more often be in situations that subject them to disgust related to their performance as parents and will more often suffer the consequences. However, there is more to it than this. Given social differences in how mothering and fathering are understood, I expect that mothers are more likely than fathers to be regarded with disgust, holding other details of the situation constant. The extent to which a person is targeted by a disgust response depends, I take it, on the extent to which she is seen as responsible for the disgusting situation. If I step in dog feces by mistake, the disgusting contamination is purely physical, and clearing it up requires only removing the offending substance and its traces. If I touch feces under duress (say, to retrieve a set of car keys that has been dropped in an inopportune location), taking pains to have no more contact than I can possibly avoid, something similar is true: the contact was voluntary, but I am not to be blamed for it. But if I choose to have such contact for no compelling reason, the contamination is more than physical. It is psychic, and calls into question my suitability for human society: my civility, as we might call it based on the previous discussion. I suspect that fathers are less likely than mothers to be regarded as responsible for the disgusting situations that arise in parenting for, fundamentally, a child is seen more as the mother’s responsibility than as the father’s. When a woman takes her child to the grocery store or the playroom at the public library, this is regarded as a regular aspect of her parental duties; and there is an expectation that she should have achieved mastery of such routine activities quite early in the child’s life, such that there is no excuse for dirty clothes or snotty noses. When a father takes his child to the library or the store, however, this is seen as exceptional: the father is assumed not to have routine responsibility for the child, and thus lapses of hygiene are more likely to be attributed to the natural bumbling of someone who has been thrust into an unfamiliar situation, and thus seen as out of his control. It may even be thought that he inherited the child’s disgusting condition from the unseen mother, who despite her absence bears the ultimate responsibility for maintaining the child’s hygiene. Whereas the child is disgusting, then, the father is not. Moreover, the father is more likely to be seen as generous or charitable insofar as he is temporarily relieving the mother of her rightful duties, and this may mitigate the sort of morally charged disgust response that would otherwise be directed at him. Being exposed to conditions that would normally be regarded as contaminating in the course of charitable work, as with the homeless or with the desperately poor in a developing country, does not suggest that one is oneself fundamentally corrupted; indeed,

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exposure to disgusting conditions in the service of others may be seen as morally elevating, a sign of saintliness. If fathering is seen as a charitable activity while mothering is seen as the fulfillment of a routine duty of life, then the significance of the same disgusting conditions may be fundamentally different in the two cases. CONCLUSION I don’t mean to overstate the case here. Mothering is fun and tremendously rewarding, and in my experience the suspension of disgust is part of what makes it so. My newfound ability to revel in dirt, snot, and spit, rather than having them serve as obstacles, is a manifestation of a joyous engagement with my child and in a new form of life that he has made possible. At the same time, however, it’s important to recognize the enduring mechanisms, both overt and subtle, through which the oppression of women is maintained even as society embraces egalitarian rhetoric. I have suggested that the suppression of the disgust response contributes to good mothering: it promotes valuable forms of intimacy and knowledge along with a parenting style that facilitates the child’s exploration of the world. However, it also, by leading me to engage in unruly behavior that generates disgust responses in others, makes me vulnerable to subtle forms of dehumanization and assaults on my dignity. I could, no doubt, minimize these effects by acceding to the demands implicit in the disgusted gaze: retreating to the toilets to breastfeed; forgoing a quick trip to the grocery store after day care; perpetually wiping, combing, and tidying. But this would be to acquiesce to rather than escape or resist the mechanisms of social control to which women are differentially subject. A form of life in which one is constantly, perhaps obsessively, working to preempt the disgusted gaze hardly seems preferable to a life in which one suffers that gaze. Miller suggests that expressions of disgust, directed toward targets who are assigned a lower status, can be fruitfully met by expressions of contempt, which reestablish the target as a subject rather than mere object of social judgment (1997, chap. 9). Perhaps the inner work of mothering is to replace feelings of shame with a lighthearted contempt for the societal norms that would demand it, and for the mechanisms of disgust by which those norms are enforced. The outer work, surely, is to dismantle them. NOTES 1. In the prologue to his book The Anatomy of Disgust, William Ian Miller notes that “the very mention of some subjects, necessary subjects if we are to face up to the substance and structures of the disgusting, prompts either disgust itself or low comedy. . . . I have tried,” he continues, “to maintain decorum without also becoming boring or silly, erring I think on the prissy

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

side” (1997, ix). I am perhaps less concerned for decorum than Miller, and certainly less inclined to prissiness; but I have tried, at least, to avoid gratuitously inducing disgust in the reader. I should note that breastfeeding, although it exposes one to societal disgust responses, is a privilege in our society, where many mothers work very long hours in conditions that do not enable them to pump and store breast milk for their infants’ consumption. There are undoubtedly many individual differences in how the phenomena of disgust impinge on the experiences of mothers. It also may be that there are systematic differences between the experience of mothers who are biologically female and that of transgender mothers, but I am not aware of any research addressing this matter. As Sheila Lintott has reminded me, Mary Kelly’s artwork Post-Partum Document (1973–79) explores a similar phenomenon. Kelly regarded the 139 parts of the work, including dirty diapers with feeding charts, as offering an “archaeology of everyday life” (Kelly 1996, 859). Rozin et al. hold this view about the suspension of disgust in love, suggesting that it involves “treating the other as self” (2008, 770). To my mind, this is hyperbolic: to allow the bodily substances of another to breach the boundaries of the self is not to treat the other as self. The fact that the other remains other, even as the boundaries are crossed, is a substantial part of the appeal of sex with other people (and especially, new partners). Nussbaum (2004, 360) recalls the example of Elizabeth McGarry, who was required by airport security in 2002 to drink from the bottles of breast milk she was carrying. McGarry described the experience as “embarrassing and disgusting.” For a discussion of personality and other correlates of disgust, see Haidt et al. (1994). See, e.g., Weinstock and Elliott (2009) and McDade et al. (2010). See, e.g., Rochat (1989) and Ruff et al. (1992). Korsmeyer notes that haute cuisine often capitalizes on “the moldability of pleasure out of disgust”: “When disgust or revulsion is confronted and overcome, what was at fi rst disgusting can become delicious” (2002, 219). This is distinct from the phenomenon, described by Angyal, whereby an odor that was thought to be disgusting when it was interpreted as signifying decay is seen as pleasant once it is recognized as the smell of glue (1941, 394–95). Miller agrees, saying that in the case of parenting, “the confrontation with disgust unlocks no special pleasures lurking within the disgusting” (1997, 136). Rozin et al. survey views linking core disgust with avoidance of infection, toxins, and parasites (2008, esp. 758). Disgust has been culturally adapted to protect against moral threats, as discussed by Haidt et al. (1997). Miller (1997, esp. ch. 10) discusses this matter at length. See Nussbaum (2004, esp. ch. 3; and 2010, esp. ch. 1) for discussion. As an anonymous reviewer has suggested, the case of breastfeeding raises the intertwined issues of obscenity and disgust: the act of breastfeeding elicits disgust because the mother’s exposed breast is regarded as obscene. In some instances, the disgust response may be self-protective: the observer fears the sexual arousal that he or she might experience in response to the breast, and thus demands that the breast be covered while using a disgust response to mask the feeling of arousal.

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16. Both cases, as well as other examples of harassment of breastfeeding mothers, are discussed by Marcus (2007). 17. Des Pres’s excruciating analysis of the role of disgust in the Nazi death camps (1976, esp. 60–62) is discussed by Rozin and Fallon (1987, 28). 18. The disgust some people feel about public breastfeeding often moves women to breastfeed while sitting on the toilet in a bathroom stall; being forced into a disgusting situation by one’s attempt to avoid causing disgust in others may trigger the sort of dehumanizing effect Des Pres mentions. I am grateful to Sheila Lintott for this point. 19. Empirical studies find, in general, that women are more susceptible to disgust than men; however, a recent study (Simpson et al. 2006) suggests this gender difference is exhibited only for core disgust elicitors (e.g., vomit, wounds, cockroaches, feces) and not for sociomoral disgust elicitors (e.g., betrayal, racism, hypocrisy). I am not aware of any studies of the suspension of disgust in parenting.

WORKS CITED Angyal, Andras. 1941. “Disgust and Related Aversions.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 36:393–412. Des Pres, Terrence. 1976. The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haidt, Jonathan, Clark R. McCauley, and Paul Rozin. 1994. “Individual Differences in Sensitivity to Disgust: A Scale Sampling Seven Domains of Disgust Elicitors.” Personality and Individual Differences 16:701–13. Haidt, Jonathan, Paul Rozin, Clark McCauley, and Sumio Imada. 1997. “Body, Psyche, and Culture: The Relationship between Disgust and Morality.” Psychology and Developing Societies 9:107–31. Kelly, Mary. 1996. “Preface to Post-Partum Document.” In Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, ed. Kristin Stiles and Peter Selz, 858–61. Berkeley: University of California Press. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. 2002. “Delightful, Delicious, Disgusting.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60:217–25. . 2008. “Fear and Disgust: The Sublime and the Sublate.” Revue internationale de philosophie 62:367–79. Marcus, Jake Aryeh. 2007. “Lactation and the Law.” Mothering, no. 143 (July/ August). Accessed July 1, 2010. http://www.mothering.com/breastfeeding/ lactation-and-law. McDade, Thomas W., Julienne Rutherford, Linda Adair, and Christopher W. Kuzawa. 2010. “Early Origins of Inflammation: Microbial Exposures in Infancy Predict Lower Levels of C-Reactive Protein in Adulthood.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B–Biological Sciences 277:1129–37. Miller, William Ian. 1997. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2004. Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. . 2010. From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rochat, Philippe. 1989. “Object Manipulation and Exploration in 2- to 5-MonthOld Infants.” Developmental Psychology 25:871–84. Rozin, Paul, and April E. Fallon. 1987. “A Perspective on Disgust.” Psychological Review 94: 23–41.

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, Jonathan Haidt, and Clark R. McCauley. 2008. “Disgust.” In Handbook of Emotions. 3rd ed. Ed. M. Lewis, J. M. Haviland-Jones, and L. F. Barrett, 757–76. New York: Guilford. Ruff, Holly A., Lisa M. Saltarelli, Mary Capozzoli, and Karen Dubiner. 1992. “The Differentiation of Activity in Infants’ Exploration of Objects.” Developmental Psychology 28:851–61. Simpson, Jane, Sarah Carter, Susan H. Anthony, and Paul G. Overton. 2006. “Is Disgust a Homogeneous Emotion?” Motivation and Emotion 30:31–41. Weinstock, Joel V., and David E. Elliott. 2009. “Helminths and the IBD Hygiene Hypothesis.” Inflammatory Bowel Disease 15:128–33.

Part II

Maternal Roles and Relations

6

The Practical and Theoretical Challenges of Mothering with Disabilities A Feminist Standpoint Analysis Maeve O’Donovan

INTRODUCTION People with disabilities are often perceived as incompetent, unable to contribute to society, and lacking in value. Such perceptions are employed to justify the denial of the rights of such persons, including the right to bear and parent children. Tiffany Callo, for example, a young woman with cerebral palsy, gave birth to two children. Both children were immediately placed in foster care based on the assumption that this disabled woman could not function competently as a mother. . . . Ms. Callo went to court to fight for custody, but she wasn’t even allowed to demonstrate the adaptive strategies she had developed to care for her infants. . . . The babies were eventually adopted, and she is allowed to visit each of them once a year for two hours. (Saxton 1994, 112) Challenges like those facing Ms. Callo remain widespread and negatively impact the lives and parenting work of women engaged in the art of mothering with disability. The present chapter identifies challenges such mothers face, explores able-bodied ignorances in motherhood scholarship, calls attention to certain advantages of mothering with disabilities, and introduces feminist standpoint theory as a valuable interpretive instrument for replacing ignorance with understanding.

SOURCES OF KNOWLEDGE REGARDING MOTHERING WITH DISABILITY Feminist theory contributes to our understanding of mothering and its undervalued status in contemporary society. Little of the scholarship, however, examines mothering with disability. Some suggest the gap in feminist theorizing is attributable to tensions between feminist goals and those of

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women with disabilities. Feminists have long criticized pressure on women to reenact highly sexualized representations of femininity and to identify womanhood with motherhood. In disability studies literature, many women describe frustration at not being seen as sexual, feminine, or motherly; such women aspire to the very stereotypes feminists encourage them to reject (Mintz 2007, 40). Disability studies literature is another source of research on mothers with disabilities. Here we fi nd researchers writing from their own experiences as persons with disabilities, arguing that it is only such persons who can adequately theorize the experience of disability (Ryan and Runswick-Cole 2008, 199). However, it also fails to adequately attend to the lived experiences of mothers with disabilities. This is due, in part, to tension between the use of a medical model of disability by mothers with disabilities and the widespread criticism of such a model in disability studies literature. The best source of information about mothering with disability is found at the intersection of the two fields, in feminist disability studies, where mothers with disability are engaging in and influencing theorizing about both disability and motherhood.

INSIGHTS AND GAPS IN EXISTING RESEARCH The idealization of womanhood found in conceptions of the “good mother” is challenged by the realities of mothering with disabilities. A good mother is defi ned as one who engages in “intensive mothering,” a practice of selfless devotion to a child’s needs and development. Women who fail to meet these standards are held responsible for any perceived failings in their children. Motherhood researchers call this mother-blame. A mother with disabilities, especially one marked by physical impairments, is assumed to be dependent and in need of assistance. Mothers with disabilities often do require visible assistance (canes, wheelchairs, hearing aids, seeing-eye dogs, Braille pads) and institutional assistance more often than nondisabled mothers (Malacrida 2007, 472). The combination of cultural ideals of mothering as selfless devotion with visible indicators of attending to one’s own needs and relying on institutional support increases the vulnerability of mothers with disabilities to the charge of bad parenting (Ryan and Keswick-Cole 2008, 204). In addition, when a mother with visible disabilities is seen in the company of her children, the role of carer is often attributed to the child. Such parent-child relationships are called “upside-down” (Malacrida 2007, 472), and a growing body of literature calls attention to the perceived burden on “young carers” of having parents with disabilities (Prilleltensky 2004, 210). However, when the voices and experiences of mothers with disabilities are included in such research, the notion of the child as both carer and burdened is called into question (Prilleltensky 2004, 219; Newman 620).

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Most mothers struggle with doubts about their parenting abilities, but for mothers with disabilities these doubts are repeatedly confi rmed in the comments of strangers, health-care professionals, even family members. Deborah Kent shares a characteristic encounter between a stranger and a mother with disabilities. In this case, the mother’s disability is blindness: As she was out shopping one day, carrying her baby in a backpack, a stranger launched into a vitriolic tirade, denouncing her for selfishly bringing a child into the world when obviously she couldn’t take care of it. A few days later she received an unexpected visit from Child Protective Services. There had been an anonymous report, which had to be investigated. Though the social worker found nothing amiss, and admitted the baby looked healthy, happy, and clean, the agency continued to call and visit for the next five years. (Kent 2002, 86) The intense surveillance of mothers with disabilities reinforces internalized self-doubts about their ability to be good mothers. Such surveillance often leads to removal of the child from a mother’s care (Malacrida 2007, 471). An additional burden, therefore, is anxiety at the possibility of losing the right to care for their own children (Prilleltensky 2003, 23; Grue and Lærum 2002, 676–77; Kent 2002, 85).

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC OBSTACLES Although there is not yet sufficient attention given to the intersection of race, poverty, privilege, and gender with disability, work that does exist provides important insights. One issue raised is the importance, and too frequent absence, of networks of similarly disabled friends, neighbors, and coworkers (Aunos et al. 2003, 66). Whereas all mothers rely on networks for help with the psychological challenges and practical tasks of parenting, these are harder to fi nd for mothers with disabilities. In addition, because of prejudice about their ability to protect and care for children, young girls with disabilities are rarely given opportunities to learn and develop parenting skills; girls with disabilities are rarely asked to babysit and are discouraged from pursuing such opportunities (Kent 2002, 81–82). The lack of opportunity, combined with the need to develop novel ways of parenting, leaves women with disabilities underprepared for mothering (Kocher 1994, 130). For Kent, the lack of training and subsequent gaps in knowledge about how to mother as a blind woman could only be filled with the help of other blind mothers: They recommended baby carriers that would leave my hands free for a cane or a guide-dog harness. Mixing formula was no problem, they assured me, but breastfeeding was the way to go. They explained that

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Maeve O’Donovan they attached bells to the shoes of crawling infants and lively toddlers; that way they had no trouble keeping track of a child’s whereabouts. For the first time in my life I was hearing a new and welcome message . . . blindness was not an obstacle to motherhood. (Kent 2002, 83–84)

VISIBILITY AND COGNITIVE ABLEISM Work on disability is often limited to discussion of physical disability. Feminist disability studies scholars argue that this is rooted in a “visibility” bias.1 When disabilities are not visible, or not always visible, as is the case with many cognitive disabilities, women with them may fi nd themselves excluded from the community and support provided to those with physical disabilities (Peters 1993; Stone 1993; Field 1993). As one woman with an invisible disability remarks, “When I go to a parking lot at a shopping center and I park in the disability [spot], I stand up, get out of the car and everybody gets dirty looks . . . because I’m young, what do I need a disability [spot] for?” (Peters 1993, 27). In addition to a visibility bias, variations in cognitive disabilities are also overlooked. Philosophers Kate Lindemann and Licia Carlson argue that inattention to cognitive disability results from cognitive ableism in Western culture, traceable to persistent mind-body dualism in Western philosophy. 2 Lindemann notes that her experience of acquired brain injury “caused [her] to rethink the whole philosophical enterprise” (2001, 106). For Lindemann, philosophical reflection has much to gain from incorporating the experience of mild cognitive impairment. Carlson argues that philosophical accounts of cognition ignore, to their detriment, the historical linkage of femininity and “feeblemindedness.” For Carlson, even the work of feminist disability theorists is marked by a kind of cognitive ableism—“a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of individuals who possess certain cognitive abilities (or the potential for them) against those who are believed not to actually or potentially possess them” (2001, 140). Disability studies takes an interest in challenging the strict line dividing the disabled from the nondisabled, but, according to Carlson, “there is less work on the dangers of perpetuating a form of essentialism that draws a sharp division between the cognitively able/disabled” (2001, 140). My own experience with, and subsequent interest in, “mild” cognitive disabilities such as learning disabilities situates me to see that cognitive ableism also includes a bias against those with mild cognitive disabilities. In the next section of this chapter I explore the situation facing mothers with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a form of learning disability. Although many of the above challenges are shared by such mothers, the ways in which they are experienced are unique. ADHD is one of the few disabilities whose very existence is called into question; mothers

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with ADHD, therefore, suffer from a combination of inadequate resources, ignorance on the part of motherhood scholars, invisibility, and disbelief. In exploring how and why this occurs, I am undertaking an agnotological examination of mothering with ADHD. Robert Proctor and Londa Scheibinger’s 2008 anthology, Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, explores the ways in which valuable knowledges have been lost, covered up, or intentionally ignored. The anthology argues that just as knowledge is generated, so too is ignorance, and that unmasking the processes by which ignorance is produced is an essential step in the recovery of lost knowledges (although not all lost knowledge can be recovered). Providing an account of ignorance of mothering with ADHD contributes to an epistemology of disability, a theory of the knowledge-generating function and value of persons with disabilities.

MOTHERING WITH ATTENTION DEFICIT/HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER Literature on mothering with ADHD is hard to fi nd. Discussions of ADHD in public and philosophical forums describe it either as a socially motivated practice of labeling normal behavior abnormal or as a genuine disability, but one that is inappropriately used as an excuse for bad behavior (Reynolds 2008, 619; Tait 2003, 430, 443–44). Disability scholars and feminist theorists rarely address ADHD, and when they do it is often to question its legitimacy as a disability (Lloyd and Norris 1999) or to engage in motherblame, holding a non-ADHD mother responsible for her child’s ADHD behaviors (Blum 2007, 203–6). Christine Sleeter argues that the term “learning disabilities” was invented by white middle- and upper-middle-class parents to distinguish their children from students of below-average intelligence, as a means both to avoid the negative stereotyping associated with the term “mentally retarded” and to gain special advantages for their children. One of the perceived advantages is preventing their white, privileged children from being placed in special education classrooms, which are populated by poor and minority students. The influence of Sleeter on disability studies’ conceptions of mild cognitive disabilities is substantial. By 1998, however, most of the students diagnosed as learning disabled were minorities in impoverished, minority school districts (Ong-Dean 2006, 94). In works by women with ADHD, including mothers, who counsel and coach mothers with ADHD, we find a different narrative, one in which mothers with ADHD are significantly disadvantaged by both biological characteristics and social norms of femininity. Kathleen Nadeau and Patricia Quinn explain that because of male bias in ADHD diagnostic criteria and sexism regarding women’s intellectual abilities, women with ADHD are underdiagnosed, receive less treatment than men, and are regularly left out

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of clinical research trials (Nadeau and Quinn, 2002a). Women with ADHD are most often the inattentive subtype, not the impulsive-hyperactive or combined subtypes that are better known and more common among males, which is one reason women who become mothers are rarely diagnosed. Many men with ADHD are diagnosed early in life because ADHD has disrupted their educational progress. Hyperactive and impulsive behavior in a classroom gets noticed and results in punishment, whereas a lack of attention and daydreaming, symptoms of the inattentive sub-type, rarely result in punishment. Often, parents of hyperactive-impulsive boys come to the defense of their children, arguing they should not be punished, and do so by providing alternative explanations for the behaviors, such as ADHD. Girls who are inattentive, however, are ignored; it is assumed that they are simply lacking in intellectual curiosity and ability. Because teachers and parents exist in a context that assumes women are less intelligent than men, rarely does anyone look for an alternate explanation, such as ADHD, when girls do poorly in school. As a result, women are often not diagnosed or are not diagnosed until adulthood, long after many opportunities have been lost and they have developed low self-esteem. Julie Rucklidge and Bonnie Kaplan document the damaging consequences of women’s underdiagnosis: Without a diagnostic label to help them make sense of their difficulties as children, these women developed a negative view of themselves, perceiving their problems as unchangeable. As adults, this self-perception led to more maladaptive attributional styles, elevated levels of depression and anxiety, lower self-esteem, less effective coping strategies, and more external loci of control as compared to the women without ADHD. (Rucklidge and Kaplan 2002, 139) Even when a mother has been diagnosed, current treatment regimens for ADHD reflect no awareness or consideration of the significant changes in her ADHD symptoms brought on by variations in estrogen levels. Estrogen affects the same brain mechanisms that ADHD medications aim to regulate, but best practices make no mention of adjusting medications or other aspects of treatment in response to females’ fluctuating estrogen levels (fluctuations occurring monthly and over the life-span, due to menses, pregnancy, fertility treatment, hysterectomy, and menopause; Quinn, 2002b). Best practice protocols reflect success and failure in the treatment of those who have been diagnosed. Because women are underdiagnosed and are thus a small percentage of the population receiving treatment, even mothers who have been diagnosed with ADHD are unlikely to receive adequate treatment. Another challenge facing mothers with ADHD is the fact that ADHD symptoms such as short-term memory deficits and high distractibility result in disordered eating patterns, including bulimia and binge-eating disorder. These disorders are more common in women with ADHD than women

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without it (Fleming and Levy, 2002). When a mother with ADHD is pregnant and breastfeeding, her disordered eating negatively impacts her present and future health, as well as that of her child, another potential site of mother-blame. Idealized notions of motherhood create additional obstacles for mothers with ADHD. Pressure to adopt traditional gender roles such as the good wife and the good mother mean “women have more tasks to do, women’s lives are often more diffuse, women with children have more responsibilities,” whereas “men more often have partners who organize their lives . . . secretaries or other assistants organizing them, [and] men don’t feel the same sense of shame about their disorganization” (Solden 2005, 56). Mothers with ADHD have deficits in areas where women’s social roles require strengths (Gershon 2002, 30); mothers with ADHD are more disorganized and less able to carry out multiple tasks at one time than non-ADHD mothers. They also lack the support staff available to fathers. For such women, it is thus much harder to succeed at mothering as currently idealized; often the femininity of a mother with ADHD is called into question because of the same failures. Socioeconomic factors play a significant role in living with ADHD. As of 2008, “disablement and poverty often occur together for women in the United States. More than one third of women with disabilities live in poverty, among the highest rates for any group in the United States. . . . A high percentage of women with disabilities are women of color” (Parish et al. 2008, 51). According to Jacquelyn Litt, “low-income families have more disability and chronic illness than others. They have high costs, unstable employment, and few good child care options” (2004, 630) that make them more likely to depend on governmental support. In addition, because of “out-of-pocket expenses of caring for a child [with disabilities] . . . [lowincome families] face special vulnerability to poverty; these are ‘expensive children in poor families’” (Litt 2004, 630). Litt studied the impact of welfare reform on women who rely on SSI benefits. Much to her surprise, Litt discovered that the large majority of women losing their benefits were women with children with ADHD (2004, 626). Eligibility standards were changed to require children to demonstrate functional limitations, and children with ADHD were deemed not functionally limited; their mothers were therefore no longer eligible for benefits (2004, 626). The claim that ADHD is not sufficiently disabling was central to the loss of these women’s benefits. According to Litt’s analysis, “the new standards for SSI refigured notions of children’s disability in ways that were utterly disconnected to the practical problems that children’s disability raised for caregivers’ daily routines. It is the carework demands, according to [the interviewed mothers], that signal the extent and severity of a child’s disability” (2004, 637). Because ADHD is hereditary, it is more likely than not that a child with ADHD has a parent with ADHD. If it is the mother, then she is already struggling to succeed at mothering; taking

100 Maeve O’Donovan away her SSI benefits makes it that much harder for her to succeed in mothering with ADHD. The last section of the present chapter utilizes feminist standpoint theory to understand, learn from, and value the unique experiences of mothers and mothering with disabilities. In doing so it argues for the development of the knowledges of such mothers. These women are an untapped resource in academia; their knowledge regarding mothering with disability is largely unknown, underdeveloped, and underappreciated. Our ignorance of such knowledges is also a potential source of knowledge.

A FEMINIST STANDPOINT ANALYSIS OF MOTHERING WITH ADHD In the 1970s, Dorothy Smith gave the name “women’s standpoint” to the insights emerging from women’s consciousness-raising groups. For her, what set these insights apart was their ability to describe errors in accounts of “reality” given by those in positions of power, and in particular, errors with significant social and political consequences. For Smith, it was the marginalization of women that generated this capacity to see the world more accurately than men. As others further explored Smith’s insights, a number of permutations developed, chief among them feminist standpoint theory. According to feminist standpoint theorists, there are differences in perception attributable to differences in the concrete lived realities of those doing the perceiving. A standpoint is not the same as a social position; it requires active reflection on the ways in which one’s social and intellectual realities work to form a way of seeing the world, and the standpoint of the marginalized is usually less false than that of those in positions of power: it is epistemically privileged. In the present chapter, the marginalized group is mothers with disabilities in incorporating their experiences in accounts of mothering with disability, a new, less false understanding emerges. Included in the understanding is knowledge gleaned from an analysis of why the voices of mothers with ADHD have so often been ignored. In Agnotology, Proctor identifies three kinds of ignorance: ignorance as native state; ignorance as strategic ploy (actively produced); and ignorance as lost realm or selective choice, ignorance with “a political geography” (produced passively; 2008, 6). For Proctor, attending to the latter type of ignorance, the type of ignorance we fi nd most often in discussions of mothering with disability, prompts us to ask: “Who knows not? And why not? Where is there ignorance and why?” (2008, 6)

Who Knows Not? According to Genevieve Lloyd, Western philosophy buttresses the conception of the ideal knower as male, unemotional, objective, and freed

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from concerns about the body. This is clearly a knower lacking in intellectual and physical disabilities. Feminist and critical race theorists argue that philosophical notions of reason serve to justify the exclusion of women and minorities from equal participation in society, including participation in scholarly work (learning, teaching, and researching). Disability theorists argue that the centrality of adequate reasoning abilities and able(body)-ness in our conceptions of the human person serve to exclude persons with disabilities from scholarly activity and most other domains of human activity, parenting being one such domain. Ignorance about disability, it is argued, is central to such exclusionary practices. So why in all of these disciplines is there a failure to attend to persons with ADHD? Why is there so much ignorance regarding mothering with ADHD?

And Why Not? I argue that the disciplines I have been describing can reasonably be expected to recognize and develop the knowledge-generating capacities of mothers with disabilities, such as ADHD, yet they do not. I argue that such ignorance results from the unfi nished nature of efforts to challenge traditional conceptions of both knowledge and the persons qualified to generate knowledge.

Where Is There Ignorance? And Why? ADHD is underdiagnosed in women, and a woman’s experience of ADHD changes every time her estrogen level fluctuates. ADHD is regularly diagnosed in racial minorities; often found in low-income families, once but no longer automatically qualifi able as a disability deserving of public assistance; inheritable and therefore frequently present in more than one member of a family; treated with suspicion by many in scholarly and public domains; invisible; a cognitive disability that can be improved through medical treatment; and a cognitive disability that does not necessarily impede intellectual, scholarly work. Also critical in understanding our ignorance of mothering with ADHD is the fact that most of the people diagnosed are children and much of the research assumes that ADHD does not persist into adulthood, therefore most of the literature is about understanding children with ADHD. The association between childhood and ADHD intersects with the historical linkage of femininity and feeblemindedness to produce ignorance of mothering with ADHD. Because scholarly work is usually not carried out by children, parenting work is usually carried out by persons who have undergone puberty, and parenting work is usually carried out by women, literature on children with ADHD sheds little light on mothers with ADHD. In addition, because mothers with ADHD are cognitively

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disabled, and feeblemindedness and a lack of intellectual maturity are associated with womanhood, then it is no surprise that mothers with ADHD are not motherhood scholars. If these associations are not challenged, there is little reason to expect that mothers with ADHD and their experiences will be incorporated into motherhood scholarship. This is ignorance as lost realm, passively produced in that it does not stem from a deliberate effort to obscure our understanding of mothers with ADHD; instead, it is ignorance “encouraged here and discouraged there from ten thousand accidents (and deliberations) of social fortune” (Proctor 2008, 6). Ignorance of mothering with ADHD is also actively produced; every time someone expresses doubts about the existence of ADHD, the right of a mother to claim the disability for herself is challenged. According to Lindemann, pressure to become recognized experts has led academics, including feminists (and presumably feminist disability theorists), to research and publish in very narrowly defi ned areas. What is needed, she argues, is a willingness to be the nonexpert, a willingness to step out of one’s narrow training and into the world of interdisciplinarity and intersectionality, a willingness to let experience rather than theory guide one’s thinking. In the absence of such willingness, the lived experiences of nonexperts—in the present case, mothers with ADHD—are unknown, ignored, or dismissed. I label the failure to listen to mothers with ADHD an epistemic injustice in the sense described by Miranda Fricker: a phenomenon where “some social groups are unable to dissent from distorted understandings of their social experiences” (2006, 96). Mothers with ADHD suffer a social injustice as well because the above contributions to the production of ignorance of mothering with ADHD leave them unable to identify, and therefore understand, an important aspect of their mothering activity. The use of feminist standpoint theory in feminist disability studies is increasing, as is attention to women with ADHD. 3 Shari Stone-Mediatore (2001) argues that despite the work of feminist standpoint theorists, many marginalized voices continue to be excluded from scholarly work. Although the method of feminist standpoint theorists is not to blame, its use has been insufficiently transformative. Like Stone-Mediatore, I believe that the method is an excellent resource for arguing that when a group, such as mothers with ADHD, is excluded from knowledge production about their own lives, feminists should pay attention. Stone-Mediatore argues that notions of objectivity continue to govern assessments of the scholarly value of feminist and cross-cultural work: “authors from culturally dominant groups tend to seem neutral while writers whose identities deviate from the culturally constituted norm are considered biased” (2001, 60). I would argue the same is true of mothers with and without disabilities like ADHD, where mothers with ADHD are the subculture treated as a biased and unreliable source of knowledge by motherhood scholars without ADHD.

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ADVANTAGES OF MOTHERING WITH DISABILITY The many challenges facing mothers with disabilities have been used to justify the denial of their parenting rights. We have since learned, through the advocacy work of many of these mothers, including their research, that they can be and often are excellent parents. We are also learning that in some ways mothers with disabilities are better mothers than those without disabilities and, perhaps, can provide less false accounts of mothering with disability. Marsha Saxton notes that although discussions about the rights of persons with disabilities to bear and raise children persist in our culture, “those who have lived with disability and indeed reframed the social issues . . . are formulating different [research] questions” (1994, 113). When mothers with disabilities are the ones generating motherhood research, new, less false knowledge about mothering with disability is the result. As previously mentioned, that less false knowledge can be produced when marginalized groups are doing the theorizing is a central tenet of feminist standpoint theory. One of the newer developments in motherhood and disability scholarship is attention to the advantages of mothering with disabilities. Although naming and understanding the challenges of mothering with disability is important for the transformation of oppressive practices, working to identify advantages produces a radically different vision. Susan Fitzmaurice writes about the life-enhancing nature of disability, for both her and her son. Fitzmaurice has mobility impairments and her son has Down syndrome. In everyday tasks, such as doing laundry, asking for assistance, and setting goals, Fitzmaurice fi nds her son to be an essential aide and an inspiration. In assisting his mother with these tasks, her son is given opportunities for independence and skill development often denied to persons with Down syndrome. Reflecting on these practices, she concludes, “I am an unusually qualified mother to my son with disabilities because of my own disabilities” (2002, 123). Susannah Mintz describes the memoir of a mother’s life with cerebral palsy and its impact on her adopted son, who also has cerebral palsy. Mintz notes that where day-care providers are unable to distinguish between the son’s disability and his personality, seeing both as defective, the mother is able to resist such a characterization—and in doing so is able to be a better advocate for her son than a mother who does not have cerebral palsy (2007, 150). Kent notes that her daughter’s attitude toward disability is different, and positive, because her mother is blind. For her daughter, disability is natural and normal, not abnormal or a mark of defectiveness (2002, 87). Finally, Christine Adamec explains how the symptoms of ADHD, although often a source of frustration, can also be a source of successful and novel parenting techniques: “the creativity of my ADHD patients, their ability to live in the moment, and . . . think ‘outside the box’ have given their families great joy” (2000, xv).

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CONCLUSION I end this chapter with a call to seek out the missing voices, missing knowledges, lost knowledges, and potential future knowledges of mothers with disabilities, especially ADHD. I believe the most fruitful way to do so is to employ feminist standpoint theory methodology in generating research by such women, research that assumes mothers with disabilities are not only competent parents, they may also be, in important areas, better parents than mothers without disabilities.

NOTES 1. See Marian Corker, “Sensing Disability,” Hypatia 16.4 (2001): 34–52; Karen Elizabeth Jung, “Chronic Illness and Educational Equity: The Politics of Visibility,” NWSA Journal 14.3 (2002): 178–200; Adrienne Asch, “Critical Race Theory, Feminism, and Disability: Reflections on Social Justice and Personal Identity,” Ohio State Law Journal 62 (2001): 1–17. 2. See also Eva Feder Kittay and Licia Carlson, eds., Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). 3. See Patrice Buzzanell, “A Feminist Standpoint Analysis of Maternity and Maternity Leave for Women with Disabilities,” Women and Language 26.2 (2003): 53–65; Mary Briody Mahowald, “Our Bodies Ourselves: Disability and Standpoint Theory,” Social Philosophy Today 21 (2005): 237–46; Parish et al. (2008); and Joey Sprague and Jeanne Hayes, “SelfDetermination and Empowerment: A Feminist Standpoint Analysis of Talk About Disability,” American Journal of Community Psychology 28.3 (2000): 671–95.

WORKS CITED Adamec, Christine A. 2000. Moms with ADD: A Self-Help Manual. Lanham, MD: Taylor. Aunos, Marjorie, Georgette Goupil, and Maurice Feldman. 2003. “Mothers with Intellectual Disabilities Who Do or Do Not Have Custody of Their Children.” Journal on Developmental Disabilities 10.2: 65–80. Blum, Linda M. 2007. “Mother-Blame in the Prozac Nation: Raising Kids with Invisible Disabilities.” Gender & Society 21.2: 202–26. Carlson, Licia. 2001. “Cognitive Ableism and Disability Studies: Feminist Reflections on the History of Mental Retardation.” Hypatia 16.4: 124–46. Field, Jane. 1993. “Coming Out of Two Closets.” Canadian Woman Studies 13.4: 18–19. Fitzmaurice, Susan. 2002. “A Mother’s Narrative: Reflections on Life with Disability.” Sexuality and Disability 20.2: 117–23. Fleming, John, and Lance Levy. 2002. “Eating Disorders.” In Gender Issues and AD/HD: Research, Diagnosis and Treatment, ed. Patricia O. Quinn and Kathleen G. Nadeau, 411–26. Silver Spring, MD: Advantage. Fricker, Miranda. 2006. “Powerlessness and Social Interpretation.” Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 3.1: 96–108.

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Gershon, Jonathan. 2002. “An Overview of Research.” Gender Issues and AD/ HD: Research, Diagnosis and Treatment, ed. Patricia O. Quinn and Kathleen G. Nadeau, 23–38. Silver Spring, MD: Advantage. Grue, Lars, and Kristin Tafjord Lærum. 2002. “‘Doing Motherhood’: Some Experiences of Mothers with Physical Disabilities.” Disability & Society 17.6: 671–83. Kent, Deborah. 2002. “Beyond Expectations: Being Blind and Becoming a Mother.” Sexuality and Disability 20.1: 81–88. Kocher, Meg. 1994. “Mothers with Disabilities.” Sexuality and Disability 12.2: 127–33. Lindemann, Kate. 2001.“Persons with Adult-Onset Head Injury: A Crucial Resource for Feminist Philosophers.” Hypatia 16.4: 105–23. Lloyd, Genevieve. 1984. Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy. London: Methuen. Lloyd, Gwynedd, and Claire Norris. 1999. “Including ADHD?” Disability & Society 14.4: 505–17. Litt, Jacquelyn. 2004. “Women’s Carework in Low-Income Households: The Special Case of Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.” Gender and Society 18.5: 625–44. Malacrida, Claudia. 2002. “Alternate Therapies and Attention Deficit Disorder: Discourses of Maternal Responsibility and Risk.” Gender & Society 16.3: 366–85. . 2007. “Negotiating the Dependency/Nurturance Tightrope: Dilemmas of Motherhood and Disability.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 44.4: 469–93. Mintz, Susannah B. 2007. Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Nadeau, Kathleen G., and Patricia O. Quinn. 2002a. “An Unexamined Gender Bias.” In Gender Issues and AD/HD: Research, Diagnosis and Treatment, ed. Patricia O. Quinn and Kathleen G. Nadeau, 2–22. Silver Spring, MD: Advantage. . 2002b. “Rethinking DSM-IV.” In Understanding Women with AD/ HD, ed. Kathleen G. Nadeau and Patricia O. Quinn, 2–23. Washington, D.C.: Advantage. Newman, Tony. 2002. “‘Young Carers’ and Disabled Parents: Time for a Change of Direction?” Disability & Society 17.6: 613–25. Ong-Dean, Colin. 2006. “High Roads and Low Roads: Learning Disabilities in California, 1976–1998.” Sociological Perspectives 49.1: 91–113. Parish, Susan, Sandra Magaña, and Shawn A. Cassiman. 2008. “It’s Just That Much Harder: Multilayered Hardship Experiences of Low-Income Mothers with Disabilities.” Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work 23.1: 51–65. Peters, Sherry L. 1993. “Having a Disability ‘Sometimes.’” Canadian Woman Studies 13.4: 26–27. Prilleltensky, Ora. 2003. “A Ramp to Motherhood: The Experiences of Mothers with Physical Disabilities.” Sexuality and Disability 21.1: 21–47. . 2004. “My Child Is Not My Carer: Mothers with Physical Disabilities and the Well-Being of Children.” Disability & Society 19.3: 209–23. Proctor, Robert N. 2008. “Agnotology: A Missing Term to Describe the Cultural Production of Ignorance.” In Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, ed. Robert. N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, 1–33. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Quinn, Patricia O. 2002. “Hormonal Influences.” In Understanding Women with AD/HD, ed. Kathleen G. Nadeau and Patricia O. Quinn, 86–102. Washington, D.C.: Advantage.

106 Maeve O’Donovan Reynolds, Cecil R. 2008. “Introduction to the Special Issues on ADHD in Adults: Overcoming Resistance while Avoiding Zealotry.” Journal of Attention Disorders 11:619–22. Rucklidge, Julie, and Bonnie Kaplan. 2002. “The Effects of Late Diagnosis upon Women with AD/HD: Lost Loves and the Power of Understanding.” In Gender Issues and ADHD: Research, Diagnosis, and Treatment, ed. Patricia O. Quinn and Kathleen G. Nadeau, 130–42. Silver Spring, MD: Advantage. Ryan, Sara, and Katherine Runswick-Cole. 2008. “Repositioning Mothers: Mothers, Disabled Children, and Disability Studies.” Disability & Society 23.3: 199–210. Saxton, Marsha. 1994. “Preface to the Special Issue on Women with Disabilities: Reproduction and Motherhood.” Sexuality and Disability 12.2: 111–15. Sleeter, Christine E. 1987. “Why Is There Learning Disabilities? A Critical Analysis of the Field in Its Social Context.” In The Formation of School Subjects: The Struggle for Creating an American Institution, ed. Thomas S. Popkewitz, 210–37. Philadelphia: Falmer. Solden, Sari. 2005. Women with Attention Deficit Disorder. Nevada City, CA: Underwood. Stone, Sharon Dale. 1993. “Must Disability Always Be Visible? The Meaning of Disability for Women.” Canadian Woman Studies 13.4: 11–13. Stone-Mediatore, Shari. 2001. “Challenging Academic Norms: An Epistemology for Feminist and Multicultural Classrooms.” NWSA Journal 19.2: 55–77. Tait, Gordon. 2003. “Free Will, Moral Responsibility and ADHD.” International Journal of Inclusive Education 7:429–46.

7

Mothers, Children with Disability, and Postmodern Sainthood Christine A. James

“I know I seem insane,” says Linda Santo. “I’m in good company. Half the saints were insane.” (Weingarten 1998, F01)

INTRODUCTION For Roman Catholics, saints are both moral exemplars and intercessory figures. Some Catholics hold an unorthodox belief that saints are “victim souls” who suffer for all of us, as Christ suffered. Most Catholics do not hold this particular belief, but there is a strong connection between sainthood and disability, or the perceived suffering and victim-soul status of disability. In the past few years, with the growing field of disability studies, books referring to saints’ disabilities have been published, and a recent conference on sainthood and disability was held at a university in the UK. (The conference “Historicizing Disability: The Middle Ages and After” took place at York University in December 2006, and one such book was Andri Vauchez and Jean Birrell’s Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages from the 1990s). In traditional Catholicism, St. Thérèse of Lisieux is often described as having a cognitive disability; in modern Catholicism, Audrey Santo, a child with physical and cognitive disabilities, is explicitly claimed to have worked miracles. The Santo family and their parish have begun the process of her canonization. As children with disabilities are conceptualized as being both less than in terms of ability and greater than in terms of closeness to God or suffering, there are particular implications for the role of their mothers. In an often-quoted piece on mothers of disabled children by Erma Bombeck, God selects a mother for a child with disabilities, and as the angels ask who will be her patron saint, God replies, “A mirror will suffice,” hinting that not only do disabled children have a special candidacy for sainthood, but that their mothers do as well. The type of sainthood that relates to these mothers is an explicitly activist, nonpassive combination of the maternal and the holy. In this chapter I will argue the idea, inspired by Bombeck, that mothers of children with disabilities should not be “too patient” lest they and their children live in despair, and that these mothers’ impatience provides an important indictment against the traditional Roman Catholic position on the more passive virtues of motherhood. This notion of active

108 Christine A. James and empowered mothers would provide a much better model for church leadership, especially given the widespread history of sexual abuse under male leadership now being exposed around the world. The reconceptualization of an activist mother of children with disabilities illustrates how the lack of female leadership, or the denial of the role of women in the church, has historically impoverished the church’s theology and its practices.

MODERN AND POSTMODERN NARRATIVES OF WOMEN AND SAINTS A philosophical piece dealing with postmodernism and motherhood is obligated to address what it means by “postmodernism.” The definition of postmodernism depends on the context and varies between academic fields. The assumption behind the distinction of modernism and postmodernism has itself been challenged in the philosophy literature, in which the question “Were we ever really modern?” has a range of answers depending on which philosopher one cites. One claim about the postmodern perspective in philosophy is that a shift has occurred from grand narratives (modern) to personal stories and the lived world of individual persons (postmodern). Grand narratives rely on a set of assumptions about the historical and spiritual trajectory of human thought. For example, the notion of a linear progress in human history, the assumption that the winners write the history books, and that the persons in power are the ones whose biographies we should be interested in as students of history. An example of the limitations of the grand narrative perspective would be the dichotomy of Madonna/whore that women in history have traditionally been limited by and defi ned by in grand historical narratives. When we read the story of a woman’s life, are we reading her as fitting a specific type? Was she good or bad? From the modern worldview, women—the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, a plantation owner’s wife in the southeastern U.S., a female slave in the antebellum period— are all defi ned in one archetypical way, as one side of the dichotomy. In contrast, the postmodern perspective and its focus on the lived experience of individual persons opens the door to multiple readings and interpretations of individual’s lives and a chance to interpret and defi ne persons in multiple ways. For example, Mary Boykin Chesnut, an accomplished diarist who lived during the Civil War and whose diaries were published and celebrated in the 1980s, is often upheld as an example of postmodern historiography. Her story is told via her day-to-day experiences, her emotions, and her personal interactions rather than via grand narratives. Her diaries reflect a woman who was deeply confl icted about issues such as slavery, not someone who accepted the grand narratives of her historical context without reflection and critique. Mary Chesnut is simultaneously the lady of the house, a jealous wife who misses her husband’s affections, a woman who is

Mothers, Children with Disability, and Postmodern Sainthood 109 dependent on her slaves, a daughter, and a hostess of social gatherings with great political import. Postmodern historians enjoy this problematic multivalence in her self-defi nition, and they turn away from modernist historian accounts of the life and achievements of her husband.1 Her rich private life in the traditional women’s sphere of the home actually turns out to be a richer story than her husband’s life in the public sphere. The recent reconceptualization of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and its popularization in the best-selling novels of Dan Brown, exemplifies a similar postmodern reclaiming of the story of Mary Magdalene as much more than a prostitute redeemed by Jesus, giving her a multifaceted portrayal as an influential early church leader. Those who write about the modern/postmodern distinction would hold that such a reclaiming of the story of Mary would not be possible if we were still limited by the modern period’s focus on grand narratives. Religious communities, and especially religious communities that rely on intercessory figures such as saints, now struggle with how to write the narrative of saints’ lives. In her article “Women and Their Mothers: Rejecting and Reclaiming the Tradition of the Saints” Marie Anne Mayeski (2001) argues that the modernist linear historical narratives and emphasis on female saints as unproblematically holy and without ambivalence, developmental arcs, or struggles had left religious women at a spiritual disadvantage. Scholars like Mayeski have engaged in a postmodernist project to reclaim the lives of the saints, highlighting their multivalent moments of good and evil, highlighting the ambivalence of their moral and ethical status. 2 This means sainthood no longer assumes a grand narrative in which a woman must be “good” her whole life to be a saint, that sainthood encompasses moments of anger, defense, even rage. 3

VICTIM SOUL CULTURE: SUFFERING AND SACRED Further insight into the ambivalence of motherhood can be found in two other cases involving saints. One is the concept of the victim soul, the notion that the saints have a special status as suffering for the sins of others in the same way as Christ. The second is the role of mothers of these saints, or victim souls, and their use of communications and technology in bringing the message of their saint-child into the mass media. One of the most famous examples is that of Audrey Santo. A victim soul is a person who believes he or she suffers as Christ suffered for others, and that suffering brings him or her close to Christ in their mutual victimhood. Paulin Giloteaux, the author of Victim Souls (1927), was inspired to maintain great personal piety from the life of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who he said set the pattern for the modern victim way with her “insatiable thirst for suffering . . . this victim life is nothing but the Christian life lived with immense attention to suffering” (Kane 2002, 100).4

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The role of suffering and its potential value in spiritual life is of paramount importance in a postmodern reclaiming of St. Thérèse of Lisieux.5 Most of us are familiar with the notion that saints lead lives that are exemplary, that they play the role of intercessory figures, and that devout Catholics consider the saints to be people to whom they can pray and ask for help. St. Thérèse of Lisieux is redescribed as one who suffered and experienced a dark night of the soul, a multivalent figure who appears to be both blessed and cursed.6 Arguably, the experience of a mother caring for a child with disabilities has similar moments of despair. In a way, the mother of a disabled child must work through a dark night of the soul before coming to an appreciation of her motherhood as a blessing.7 Part of that process is learning to engage in advocacy and seeking out necessary support for one’s child. Mothers of disabled children, in the language of being both blessed and cursed, are blessed in the process of gaining this personal power.

AUDREY SANTO Audrey Santo was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1984. She nearly drowned at the age of three and suffered severe physical and cognitive disabilities as a result of the accident. Kept alive at home by a variety of lifesupport machines and caregivers, visited by thousands of pilgrims, Audrey died in 2007 at the age of twenty-three. The possibility that Audrey was working miracles, even in her disabled state of suffering, was documented through a series of events monitored in the family home by the Roman Catholic Church (Levenson 2008). In 1993, a painting of the Virgin Mary in the home appeared to weep.8 Eucharists produced blood; oil formed on the home’s walls and inside of a priest’s cup; and sick persons who came to the home were healed (Ailworth 2008; Barry 1998). Members of the Little Audrey Santo Foundation launched a campaign in 2008 to begin the process of her beatification and canonization, necessary steps to becoming a saint recognized by the Roman Catholic Church. Bishop Robert J. McManus of the Diocese of Worcester gave the group canonical recognition, supporting their bid to persuade the Vatican to begin the process (Ailworth 2008; Pham 2009). Robert Keane, clerk of the Santo Foundation, has said he believes at least one posthumous miracle has occurred due to Audrey’s intercession. In order for one to be declared a saint, at least two posthumous miracles must be performed. Former bishop of Worcester Daniel P. Reilly noted in 1999 that the “most striking evidence of the presence of God in the Santo home is seen in the dedication of the family to Audrey. Their constant respect for her dignity as a child of God is a poignant reminder that God touches our lives through the love and devotion of others” (Reilly 1999, 2). However, the bishop notes the possibility that Audrey has suffered severe cognitive impairment is detrimental to her ability to intercede with God and become a saint:

Mothers, Children with Disability, and Postmodern Sainthood 111 In the case of Audrey herself, more study is needed from medical and other professionals regarding her level of awareness and her ability to communicate with the people around her. This is critical to the basis of the claim of her ability to intercede with God. In the meantime, I urge continued prayers for Audrey and her family. But praying to Audrey is not acceptable in Catholic teaching. (Reilly 1999, 2; emphasis in original)9 The possibility of Audrey’s sainthood is a fascinating case, considering the historical connection between suffering, disabilities (including cognitive disabilities), and sainthood. Scholarship on this connection has increased in the last few years, including a conference on disability in history that took place at the University of York in December 2006, which included sessions on disability and sainthood in time periods from the Middle Ages, Jacobean England, and the Renaissance. The University’s deputy vice-chancellor professor Felicity Riddy said, “We are working hard at York to raise disability awareness, and the Historicising Disability Conference could not be more timely” (Garner 2006). In 1997, Cambridge University Press published the book Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages by Andri Vauchez, which also draws connections between sainthood and disabilities. In the postmodern context, we can see how figures like Audrey Santo have the simultaneous status of sacredness and suffering. As they take on suffering for others, they take on a Christ-like purity: Victim souls are not culpable for their personal suffering, which God is using in order to redeem someone else. The phenomenon of vicarious suffering is hardly unique to Roman Catholicism. Indeed, the identification of a scapegoat—someone who wards off threats to the group by bearing the afflictions and wrongdoing of the community—has been a feature in many world religions and social formations. Hasidic Jews speak of zaddik, for example, as a righteous man who embodies the Torah but who also partially bears the sins of his generation. (Kane 2002, 85) As such, saints with disabilities (and arguably, the concept of victim souls) are part of a long tradition of conceptualizing persons who suffer for others as having a significant moral status in their community. These saints are conceptualized as both holier-than and lesser-than the average member of the church; their “lack” of abilities gives them heightened abilities on a spiritual plane.

LINDA SANTO: MOTHER AND MARKETER Audrey Santo has achieved the status of a global celebrity and might be one of the most technologically available, media-enriched saints/victim souls. The Little Audrey Santo Foundation website sells a variety of souvenir

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items, including a film, books, oil from her bedroom, and keychains. In 1998, ten thousand people celebrated Mass in a stadium with Audrey, who was brought in by ambulance. Her mother organized the open air mass herself (Tench 2007). Much of the notoriety and publicity surrounding Audrey is due to Linda Santo, Audrey’s mother: Linda Santo runs this house. She is everywhere. She was there when the strange manifestations began occurring more than four years ago. If there is deliberate deception, she is almost certainly complicit. Yet, to many, she seems beyond duplicity. She is aggressively likable. Twinkly. Funny. Self-deprecating. Down to earth. Above all, she is joyfully aware of how absurd this all must look. (Weingarten 1998) Immediately after Audrey was found nearly drowned in a neighbor’s pool, Linda Santo’s marriage temporarily fell apart; her husband turned to alcohol to deal with his grief and left the family home. although he returned some years later. Doctors suggested that Linda should place Audrey into an institution, but she chose instead to take her home. At fi rst, Linda did not do any publicity and did not report any of the strange phenomena occurring in the home. She focused on caregiving for Audrey and raising her other children. But in 1996, she changed her mind and opened the media floodgates wide. Linda opened her home to pilgrims eager to see Audrey in person and a number of television programs, including Abundant Life, 20/20, 60 Minutes, 48 Hours, and Oprah: In 1996 she opened her doors to a producer from the Mercy Foundation, a nonprofit Catholic organization that fi lmed a slick one-hour documentary called “Audrey’s Life: Voice of a Silent Soul.” The tape has sold 2,000 copies, and has been broadcast several times on the Eternal Word Television Network, a religious cable channel. The video is clearly partisan. Inevitably, it points out that Santo means “holy one.” It argues that Audrey is almost certainly a “victim soul,” a person chosen to suffer for others; victim souls are said to speak to God, interceding on behalf of supplicants who petition them with prayer. (Weingarten 1998) Clearly, the publicity and the income of the Little Audrey Santo Foundation has helped the family cope with the situation.10 The possibility that the miracles are all artificial and contrived cannot be denied, although the church is still progressing with Audrey’s beatification and recently declared her a Servant of God, which is the fi rst step in the Roman Catholic Church’s canonization process. Consider the story of Linda and Audrey Santo in light of the earlier discussion of reclaiming and reinterpreting the lives of saints in the postmodern context. Linda Santo is not merely an unproblematic, pure, holy

Mothers, Children with Disability, and Postmodern Sainthood 113 Madonna figure. She is simultaneously Audrey’s mother and marketer, a PR specialist, and an agent. She did not passively accept suffering; rather, she became an active advocate for her daughter and continues to petition the church for Audrey’s canonization as a saint. Obviously, her course of action is highly controversial, and most would find the bold marketing of Audrey items to be distasteful. But is this the kind of revisioning of a saint’s life and a mother’s life that are examples of insight into motherhood for theologians like Mayeski? As a mother, Linda Santo is aware that her actions seem controversial, and possibly an elaborate ruse. But she embraces the idea, feeling herself to be in good company as so many other saints were “insane” as well. Most of the people who write about Linda Santo portray her as eminently likeable and funny. Even after the Washington Post had oil from Audrey’s room tested and discovered it was a commonly available combination of typical cooking oil and chicken grease, they are willing to note that there is something of the miraculous in Linda Santo’s handling of her daughter’s medical condition and its effect on her family: Linda Santo has defied conventional wisdom and kept her child alive through heroic love. She has stayed strong and resolute in the face of unimaginable tragedy. Her joy and spirit have inspired thousands. She has given solace to the sick and dying. Her fortitude outlasted her husband’s despair, triumphed over it, brought him back to the home, and to God. Okay. It’s a miracle, says the Washington Post. (Weingarten 1998) It is possible, then, that as we reclaim and reenvision the narratives of the lives of saints and mothers that we will have to look for these other kinds of miracles—not the miracles of visions, weeping statues, oil, the face of Jesus in a piece of toast, but the miracles of love and care that occur within families specifically because of a mother’s strength and fortitude in the face of personal challenges. Consider the piece “Mothers of Disabled Children” by Erma Bombeck. In it, Bombeck describes the process by which God chooses which mother will have which child. A woman who is joyful and laughing is assigned a child with a disability, and an angel asks God why he would give a child with a disability to a mother who is so happy, implying that the child’s condition will destroy the mother’s happiness. “Could I give a handicapped child a mother who does not know laughter? That would be cruel,” says God. Next the angel asks if the woman has enough patience to be the mother of a child with a disability. God responds: I don’t want her to have too much patience or she will drown in a sea of self-pity and despair. Once the shock and resentment wears off, she’ll handle it. I watched her today. She has that feeling of self and independence. She’ll have to teach the child to live in her world and that’s not going to be easy. (Bombeck 1993)

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The experience of a mother who is effective arguably reflects this kind of self-awareness, and a keen sense of when to be “impatient,” especially if one is to be mother to a child with disabilities. What Bombeck is invoking here is a concept of motherhood that acknowledges and incorporates the inner strength and resilience of knowing when to fight, when to stand up for oneself. The model of a mother of children with disabilities that Bombeck describes is a powerful, active, activist mother who has her own voice and uses it to get what her child needs. She is strong enough for herself, and she is strong enough to teach her child to be strong. This same strength reflected in the reclaimed narratives of female saints, their self-determination, is exactly what Bombeck means. Notice then that the mother of the disabled child Bombeck describes has a strong sense of independence, even an independence from the child. But at the same time, the mother will be invested in the child’s achievements, whatever they may be, so that she can fully appreciate each moment in the child’s life: “When her child says ‘Momma’ for the fi rst time, she will be present at a miracle and know it!” (Bombeck 1993). One can reinterpret the story of Linda Santo as embodying this kind of mother. Linda clearly saw each day with Audrey as miraculous; Linda kept her sense of humor; and she is clearly standing up for Audrey’s status in the church in an independent way, responding to the criticism and skepticism that surrounds the case with a kind of calm and quiet grace. She embraces the ambivalence of her position: a nurturer and a nut, a marketer and a mother, consecrated and controversial.

MOTHERS IN THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH The importance of the mothers of children with disabilities embracing postmodern dualities and ambivalent self-defi nitions is clearest against the backdrop of the official policies of the Roman Catholic Church. In November 1978, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) released an official pastoral statement on people with disabilities. The statement argued for inclusion of persons with disabilities in church rituals, the value of interaction with persons with disabilities, and the notion that the wholeness of the church warrants such interaction and inclusion. The overarching message was that people with disabilities do not want pity, but participation (USCCB 1999, Sections 14–25). The statement is primarily intended as a guide for clergy, noting that ministry to people with disabilities should be a “special focus” of the church for the future.11 Note that the bishops focus on daily church practices and carefully avoid any discussion of saints as persons with disabilities, as victim souls, or as intercessory figures. The statement reinforces a distinct modernist hierarchy in which the person with disabilities is described as less-than those who are without disabilities. Indeed, persons with disabilities are described as “marginal people”: “The

Mothers, Children with Disability, and Postmodern Sainthood 115 Church fi nds its true identity when it fully integrates itself with these marginal people, including those who suffer from physical and psychological disabilities” (USCCB 1978, Section 12). Given that this is the official statement of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, perhaps the incorporation of activist, postmodernist narratives into the self-understanding of mothers is useful and necessary. One should note that the bishops do describe persons with disabilities as holding a special place in the “shadow of the cross” because their special status forges patience, perseverance, compassion, and sensitivity: They bring with them a special insight into the meaning of life; for they live, more than the rest of us perhaps, in the shadow of the cross. And out of their experience they forge virtues like courage, patience, perseverance, compassion and sensitivity that should serve as an inspiration to all Christians. (USCCB 1978, Section 13)12 This pastoral statement has served as the basis for many Catholic statements on persons with disabilities since it was written it was revised in 1989 and 1999 but retained language celebrating the patience of persons with disabilities. The emphasis on passive values such as patience is questionable, especially given insights of postmodern theologians discussing the active, even selfish decisions made by mothers in the history of the church, and Erma Bombeck’s humorous but insightful idea that mothers of children with disabilities should not be “too patient” lest they and their children live in despair. The lives of these activist mothers may provide an important indictment against the bishop’s position on the virtues. One statement more informed by theological presupposition was written by Pope John Paul II in 1981, titled “The International Year of Disabled Persons.” Since the 1970s, the Vatican has released many statements on the place in the church of persons with disabilities. This particular statement is especially significant because it offers a brief theological basis for the integration of persons with disabilities. In 1985, Chicago cardinal Joseph Bernadin produced his companion statement, “Access to the Sacraments of Initiation and Reconciliation for Developmentally Disabled Persons.” The statement for the Archdiocese of Chicago became accepted as the theological rationale for the access to the sacraments of Initiation and Reconciliation for people with cognitive disabilities in many archdioceses in the U.S.. Based strongly on relationship theology, it upholds the idea that relationships between people and the creation of the right moral community is paramount. Especially in regard to persons with cognitive disabilities, the relationship between members of the church community and with God is more important than whether or not the person understands or comprehends the sacraments.13 A central tenet of relationship theology is that bonds between people that have been broken should be healed and mended. This is reflected within the Vatican statement in recognition of

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past wrongs, which has as its goal the reconciliation of church leadership with the disabled persons. Many of these past wrongs were acknowledged in light of geopolitical terms, with a strong influence from human rights documents produced by the United Nations.14 The influence of the United Nations on the document was a break from Vatican tradition, but the current Roman Catholic Church is seeking to uphold a new ethical stance after years of scandals involving abuse of children. The document’s goal of correcting past wrongs and healing bonds within the church community was in direct reference to specific wrongs, such as those outlined in Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s 1999 article “Institutionalized Sex Abuse and the Catholic Church.” Scheper-Hughes highlights specific instances of abuse from neglect to extreme sexual abuse in Catholic contexts internationally, including Brazil, the U.S., and Ireland. Perhaps in alignment with the twentieth-century belief in victim souls, Roman Catholics in many countries had been taught to believe that child death was not a tragedy, but a special grace.15 Scheper-Hughes and many other scholars give a sociohistorical critique of examples of children mistreated in the church, clarifying the way that the church fostered a connection between poverty, unplanned pregnancies, celibacy, and ignorance about sexual practices. This atmosphere of poverty, ignorance, and unquestioning submission to authority led to increasing numbers of child abuse cases. Such cases were covered up, sometimes involving collusion between archdiocese officials, priests, nuns, and parents. Arguably, a number of these cases involved children with disabilities, such as the case of Father Lawrence C. Murphy, who had molested as many as two hundred deaf boys at St. John’s School for the Deaf in Wisconsin while he worked there from 1950 to 1974 (Cole 2010). This history of abuse in the Roman Catholic Church could have been very different if mothers were held in a higher status and given a more active role in the lives of their children; the notion that women and especially mothers must be passive, asexual, or sexually uninformed provided opportunity for priests to take advantage of boys who were still sexually uneducated. Their mothers were not present, and according to church teachings, would not have felt free to teach their sons the basics of sexual behavior or the simple notion of “good touch” versus “bad touch.” When we combine maternal concern for children with disabilities with the current sex abuse scandals of the Roman Catholic Church, the potential value of a mother who is an activist, who does not buy into the modernist archetypes of obedience but who instead is willing to embrace and be emboldened by a postmodernist reinterpretation of a woman’s and a mother’s strength, new directions for the church and its concept of motherhood become clear. This message was also present in the media response to the Catholic Church abuse scandals, including an article by Lisa Miller in Newsweek during April 2010 titled “What Would Mary Do? A Woman’s Place Is in the Church.” The article provides an incisive

Mothers, Children with Disability, and Postmodern Sainthood 117 analysis of why women’s leadership may be the best hope for saving the Roman Catholic Church in the future, and why the church’s lack of female leadership, or denial of women’s actual roles in the early church, has impoverished both its theology and its practices. In an effort to heal its past and acknowledge in some small way its illtreatment of children and the disabled, the Vatican’s introductory statement notes: Disability is not a punishment, it is a place where normality and stereotypes are challenged and the Church and society are moved to search for that crucial point at which the human person is fully himself. This paper aims to help discover that the person with disability is a privileged interlocutor of society and the Church. (Vatican Committee for the Jubilee Day 2000, Part 5, Paragraph 3) Although the Vatican’s statement does not uphold any notion that persons with disabilities can have a special status with intercession or victim soul roles, it does give the status of disabled persons as privileged interlocutor, one who is in dialogue with the church and potentially an interrogating example with which church policies and activities can be pressed and tested. Although the Roman Catholic Church was not encouraging mothers of children with disabilities to be very active, the church itself was taking on an active role in disabilities rights on an international level. The church entered into dialogue on statements on human rights from secular bodies like the United Nations so that it could have a voice in international politics to influence governmental policies on persons with disabilities. In Section 2 of the document, the church describes its role as connecting policies of government bodies and their acceptance on the part of citizens, must stimulate direct assumption of responsibility by individuals in all forms, from the protection of rights, to fiscal contribution to support assistance services, to adhering to programmes of prevention, to the promotion of legislative measures which indicate in every field of social life the collective will to respect parity of rights for persons with disabilities. If this is a criterion, which cannot be avoided for the Christian, it can in any case be a criterion of choice for every type of society. In this section, the Vatican is giving a clear charge that the active church community member should be in dialogue with government, have a voice in public life, and actively promote and support specific legislation and policies that will give parity and equality to persons with disabilities. In the fi nal section of the statement, the issue of shaping the social order more broadly and monitoring the quality of life of those who may have limited access to information, is addressed:

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Christine A. James It is a sad fact that persons with disabilities are vulnerable to the change in social, political and economic movements. For example, it is foreseen that the present social transformation will result in an economic order in the 21st century, in which knowledge will be the main resource, rather than manpower, natural resources or capital; a social order in which inequality based on knowledge will be the greatest challenge; in public policies in which the government is unable to solve social and economic problems.

So although the Catholic church is still assuming a hierarchy in which persons with disabilities must be protected and watched over, the issue of their quality of life is addressed in new ways, especially with added attention to governmental policy and statements of human rights from organizations outside the church, such as the United Nations. In contrast, a few years later in 2006, the Vatican decided not to sign on with the United Nations General Assembly’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities because it included a clause requiring member nations to provide “sexual and reproductive health” and “populationbased public health programs” to people with disabilities (Westen 2006; McFeely 2007). The Vatican’s concern was that the latest UN convention would be used to promote abortion, and particularly abortion of fetuses that were found to have disabilities. It is also significant to note that the U.S. did not sign on to the convention either (Westen 2006). The fact that the U.S. did not sign is an example of the Bush administration’s social policies at the time. The relations between the US government and the UN after 9/11were not positive, and the UN was discussing these reproductive rights issues at the same time states such as Kansas were legislating bans on abortions in any circumstance, including rape and incest. Although the concern over abortion of fetuses with disabilities is a very valid concern, it would be difficult to show that the UN convention would have promoted or marketed abortion in a significant way. The most important aspect of the convention was the provision for public health programs to be provided for people with disabilities, which would have obligated the U.S. to provide more social services than our basic Americans with Disabilities Act current standards require. One area where the church has indeed been consistent is in celebrating the special, miraculous nature of families and parents who rise to the occasion and take care of children with disabilities. An article in the Niedziela Sunday Catholic Magazine by Lilla Danilecka, “Every Child Is a Holy History” (2006), further discusses the active role taken by mothers of children with disabilities: Christiane and Pol-Marie are Belgian and they are founders of the Belgian branch of the adoptive work called Emmanuel-SOS-Adoption. They got married 33 years ago and dreamt of having five children.

Mothers, Children with Disability, and Postmodern Sainthood 119 Then God entered their lives and gave them nineteen kids, including nine disabled or chronically ill ones. They often smile, they are humble and their eyes are full of God’s peace. (Danilecka 2006, 1) In the Sunday Catholic Magazine piece, Christiane Boldo notes that her children remind her that every human life is precious and sacred, and that one must do whatever they can to help make a disabled person’s life worthy. This is a clear connection to the teleological focus of natural law theory, in which the community exists to help every individual live up to their full potentiality. The church’s acknowledgement that caregivers of persons with disabilities deserve gratitude and their work is valued as a part of the church community is certainly admirable. In light of the current dialogue between natural law theory (see George and Tollefsen 2009) and Rawlsian contractarian capabilities approach (see Nussbaum 2006), it points to the church’s recent shift in disability issues as an indicator of society as a whole and its current struggle with rights for persons with disabilities. The postmodern insight into the self-concept of the mothers of children with disabilities is a key aspect of this struggle. The way the community treats persons with disabilities and their mothers is a moral indicator for the state of society’s ethics in general: On the part of the disabled, hostility, discrimination, and indifference result in an environment which is more antagonistic to their flourishing than it need be, or than is reasonable. On the part of the dependency worker (the caregiver), indifference and lack of respect result in a sense that their work is unappreciated, and that they would be better off doing something more socially valued and financially remunerative. (Tollefsen 2009, 16)16 Clearly, the Roman Catholic Church has tried to fi nd a voice in secular international politics by entering into dialogue on the international stage with the United Nations and its recent statements on disability. The statements would be much richer and more forceful with attention to the true roles, and the true values, of mothers of disabled children. This includes activism, advocacy, and a willingness to voice needs and concerns not merely as part of care for others, but as part of a fully actualized self, as in Bombeck’s description: the mother who is at times laughing, independent, impatient, a full self in her own right.

CONCLUSION In order to fully understand the multifaceted subjectivity of the mother, one must view her through a multifaceted lens, the postmodern reclaiming

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of her narrative, seeing both the sacred and the profane as valuable aspects of the whole. Mothers are not merely passive holy vessels but resilient sources of strength, and when necessary, a moral mirror that humanity must use to view itself. The way mothers conceptualize themselves is central to how children will view themselves, and mothers with the right combination of independence, selfi shness, and selfl essness are the key to society’s future.

NOTES 1. Chesnut’s husband was James Chesnut Jr., a U.S. senator from South Carolina who went on to become a brigadier general in the Confederate Army under Jefferson Davis. 2. For further information on other female saints and liberating stories, see Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (1990); and Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, ed., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (1986). 3. Recent work in social and political theory includes the postmodern emphasis on multiple roles, multiple defi nitions of individual lives, and a deconstruction and transcendence of grand narratives. The work of Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari considers the notions of family, femininity, and motherhood as sites of political and ideological debate and redefi nition. This redefi nition often informs the theory and practice of social workers. One example is the article “Postmodern Children” by Norman K. Denzin (1987). Denzin discusses the current literature on the postmodern family, noting the multifaceted, multivalent, or ambivalent status of children having children: “Teenage mothers, who are otherwise denied the right to be adults, are given Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) to raise children. They are thereby presumed to be adults, when in fact they are still children. The postmodern child is simultaneously mother and child” (32). These multiple roles take on further significance in theology and religious studies literature. One example of a saint and mother whose story is reclaimed is Perpetua. A Carthaginian martyr of the early third century, Perpetua disobeyed her father, was imprisoned, and was separated from her son because she publicly gave witness to her Christian faith. While in prison, she resolved her emotional confl icts in a series of visions and dreams. She “sees” a kind of reconciliation with her father, and “sees” herself succeeding in the challenge of the arena in which Christians are killed. These visions give her the strength to make autonomous decisions and not be limited by the specific roles of daughter and mother. Similar stories of mothers in the early church that are being reclaimed include the stories of the “harlots of the desert.” The harlots were women and mothers whose stories were originally told by desert monks as a way to acknowledge the importance of human sexuality, and that wisdom, read as earthly experience rather than innocence, was necessary for true Christian holiness (Mayeski 2001, 5). Another mother story currently being reclaimed is the story of Mary, the mother of Jesus, in the Gospel of John. As Jesus dies on the cross, he tells Mary and John, “Woman, behold your son: behold your mother” (John 19:26–27 ESV Study Bible). Mary responds to the crucifi xion not by passively mourning, but by actively providing maternal care to another man who is not her blood relative. Although Mary does this in obedience to a command given by God, in doing so she consciously

Mothers, Children with Disability, and Postmodern Sainthood 121 acts against the accepted mores of her time. Historically, as the verse is still taught in a variety of contexts, the emphasis is usually placed on John as taking Mary into his family, as Mary being “in the care of John.” However, the postmodern reinterpretation of the story emphasizes the active choice on Mary’s part to stand against the societal judgments that would have met a woman like Mary, in her time, accepting John as a son and living in the home of a nonrelated male as a son. As such, Mary takes on new significance as a woman who plays a variety of roles. Mayeski notes that the reinterpretation of the story has been used as inspiration in recent novels describing the lived experience of women whose sons have been murdered by fascist regimes in Central America, for example, In Search of Bernabe by Graciela Limon (Mayeski 2001, 9). 4. St. Thérèse of Lisieux is a saint associated with a life of simplicity, especially mental simplicity. She was uneducated, largely unaware of theological debates, and although she was not formally diagnosed as having a cognitive disability she is assumed to have not progressed beyond the intelligence of a child. The last eighteen months of her life were marked by extreme illness and pain, and her writings (which were probably actually written by other members of her order or her relatives) include explicit connection between her torment and the “dark night,” the experience of those who have no faith. Known as the “Little Flower,” she advised that one becomes closer to Jesus through the “Little Way” of simpleness, she was named a doctor of the church in October of 1997. It has been argued that St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s experience of darkness and desolation has special resonance for the postmodern world, and that there is a historical continuity between her experience and that of twentieth-century saints. For example, St. Thérèse of Lisieux figures prominently in the visions of Marthe Robin, an invalid since age sixteen, who saw her own vocation as suffering as a victim soul. In 1918, Robin began to believe that her own body was the site of the cosmic battle against evil that Jesus Christ had fought and won. She had poor health in childhood, severe headaches as a teenager, a coma, and finally paralysis of her legs which left her permanently bedridden. Robin experienced three visions of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who told her that she would survive to extend St. Thérèse’s work throughout the entire world. By 1925, Marthe had formally dedicated herself as a victim soul. (Kane 2002, 111). Marthe Robin ceased sleeping and became blind in 1939; but she remained “joyful” and inspired the founding of more than seventy foyers de charité (retreat centers) around the world. Her biographers describe her remarkable and paradoxical immobile voyage (unmoving journey). In her article “Victim Spirituality in Catholicism,” Paula M. Kane argues that Catholic religious communities, such as the Catholic Worker houses, were also inspired by the concept of victim souls (2002, 112). Some who believe in the unorthodox idea of victim souls also believe that St. Thérèse of Lisieux foretold the coming of a network legion of victim souls throughout the world. For more information on the concept of the dark night of the soul in the lives of Thérèse and other saints, see Guy Gaucher’s book The Passion of Thérèse of Lisieux (trans. Anne Marie Brennan, New York: Crossroad, 1973). 5. Further discussion of Teresa of Avila’s struggles with the religious leaders of her time are found in The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus (trans. and ed. E. Allison Peers, Westminster, MD: Newman, 1950). 6. In her 2000 article “Desolation and Doctrine in Thérèse of Lisieux,” Mary Frohlich explains that Thérèse’s experience of suffering makes her a uniquely postmodern mother or older sister figure for young people: “It is here that we may encounter . . . the conjunction of Thérèse’s desolation and that of postmodern culture. The nihilistic celebration of the

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

void (explicitly, in the case of philosophical nihilists such as Nietzsche or Bataille; implicitly, in the case of the ‘lowbrow’ nihilists such as the Littleton, Colorado high school killers) . . . insofar as the void is really a void, incapable of being apprehended within intentional consciousness, Thérèse was there. She was with them. She was no different from them. In the truest sense, she became the sister of the nihilists. In short, Thérèse may have a remarkable affinity with present-day generation-X youth. Much that appears as an embrace of nihilism, such as grunge and gothic clothing styles, shocking lyrics and images in music videos, body mutilation, the dramatic exaltation of suffering, etc., is actually the expression of a poignantly courageous quest for spiritual grounding” (2000, 279). Other “victim souls” who experienced a struggle with their victimhood include leader of the Catholic Worker movement Dorothy Day and Audrey Santo. They have been specifically named victim souls for the postmodern age (Kane 2002, 101–2; Fisher 1989, 50). There is a defi nite connection between how Roman Catholics conceive of Mary as a mother and as a suffering mother, and the stories of mothers of children with disabilities like Linda Santo. The suffering of both Jesus Christ and Mary is seen as a holy and redemptively powerful act, and Roman Catholics experiencing pain often speak of “offering their pain up to God.” Whether this is a part of a genuine spiritual cleansing or a way to rationalize one’s pain and give it meaning is a complex matter of faith. There is a patriarchal tone in this bishop’s statement; once one attains sainthood it is acceptable for Roman Catholics to pray to a saint, either male or female. But because Audrey is not a saint at this time, it would not be acceptable for Roman Catholics to pray to her, only for her. Of course, it is the male Roman Catholic Church fathers (Vatican officials) who are the only ones who determine and confer sainthood. The family claims that they draw spiritual strength from the idea that Audrey is serving an important purpose as an intercessory figure for those who suffer. Arguably, the family also deals with their grief through the notion that Audrey is serving a higher purpose; she can no longer communicate with the family, but instead, she communicates directly with God. “As pastors of the Church in America, we are committed to working for a deeper understanding of both the pain and the potential of our neighbors who are blind, deaf, mentally retarded, emotionally impaired, who have special learning problems, or who suffer from single or multiple physical handicaps—all those whom disability may set apart. We call upon people of good will to reexamine their attitudes toward their brothers and sisters with disabilities and promote their well-being, acting with the sense of justice and the compassion that the Lord so clearly desires. Further, realizing the unique gifts individuals with disabilities have to offer the Church, we wish to address the need for their integration into the Christian community and their fuller participation in its life” (USCCB, 1999, Section 1). Similar points are made by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales in their 1981 pastoral statement on persons with disabilities titled “All People Together.” For further discussion of the church approach to disability in the 1980s, see John Paul II (1981). Bernadin’s statement is commensurate with natural law theory and the cultivation of the proper moral ecology in the Roman Catholic community. Perhaps this notion of the community and inclusion of those with disabilities was an influence on the December 2000 Vatican’s Committee for the Jubilee Day Special Statement on Persons with Disabilities. Citing a number of

Mothers, Children with Disability, and Postmodern Sainthood 123 international secular documents on human rights, the Vatican argues that certain duties are to be enacted by civil community members in the church, as well as those who are members of the ecclesiastical community: “The General Assembly of the United Nations took the initiative of establishing December 3 as World Day for Persons with Disabilities, (resolution 47/3 taken on December 14, 1992). In 1998 the United Nations’ Human Rights Commission declared, with resolution 1998/31 taken in April, that: Every person with disabilities has the right to protection from discrimination and to equal and full enjoyment of his or her individual human rights, as it is also laid down in instructions given in: • The Universal Declaration on Human Rights, • The International Agreement on Civil and Political Rights, • The International Agreement on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, • By the International Convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women • By the International Convention on the rights of the child • By the Convention on ‘professional rehabilitation and work (persons with disabilities)’ number 159 of the International Labour Organisation.” 15. It is shocking that the Roman Catholic Church discussed child death, even child death as a result of abuse, as a special “grace.” One can imagine that historically, with high infant mortality rates and children dying from various diseases for which medicine had no cure, the clergy felt the need to give narratives that were comforting and that attempted to rationalize the aftermath of a child’s death and the resulting grief. However, with our current understanding of child abuse, and the ongoing process of the church acknowledging past abuse, this concept, that parents were being told a story of their child being in a better place after death, is especially troubling. 16. The term “caregiver” is meant here as an inclusive term, to emphasize that in a particular family situation the caregiver might be male or female, but it is worthwhile to make the point that in the majority of cases women and mothers are providing a greater proportion of care for families in general, including children with disabilities.

WORKS CITED Ailworth, Erin. 2008. “Sainthood Is Sought for ‘Little Audrey.’” Boston Globe, September 14. Accessed November 2009. http://www.boston.com/news/local/ articles/2008/09/14/sainthood_is_sought_for_little_audrey/?page=full. Barry, Ellen. 1998. “The Strange Case of Audrey Santo.” Boston Phoenix, December 25, 1997–January 1, 1998. Accessed November 2009. http://bostonphoenix.com/archive/features/97/12/25/AUDREY_SANTO.html. Bernardin, J. 1985. Access to the Sacraments of Initiation and Reconciliation for Developmentally Disabled Persons. Chicago: Liturgy Training. Bombeck, Erma. 1993. “Mothers of Disabled Children.” Today, September 4. Accessed May 2010. http://knoahsarc.org/2010/05/06/how-god-chooses-adisabled-child-for-a-mother-erma-bombeck/. Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales. 1981. “All People Together.” Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales. London: Catholic Truth Society.

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Cole, Ethan. 2010. “Pope: Sex Scandal Arises from ‘Sin within’ Church.” Christian Today, May 15. Accessed May 2010. http://in.christiantoday.com/articles/ pope-sex-scandal-arises-from-sin-within-church/5360.htm. Collins, David J. 2007. Reforming Saints: Saint’s Lives and Their Authors in Germany, 1470–1530. Oxford Studies in Historical Theology Series. New York: Oxford University Press. Danilecka, Lilla. 2006. “Every Child Is a Holy History.” Niedziela Sunday Catholic Magazine. Accessed November 2009. http://sunday.niedziela.pl/artykul. php?dz=swiat&id_art=00043. Denzin, Norman K. 1987. “Postmodern Children.” Society (March/April): 32–35. Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schussler. 1990. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. New York: Crossroad. Fisher, James. 1989. The Catholic Counterculture in America, 1933–1962. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Frohlich, Mary, H. M. 2000. “Desolation and Doctrine in Thérèse of Lisieux.” Theological Studies 61:261–79. Garner, David. 2006. “Disability in History: York Provides a Unique Perspective.” Press release, November 20. University of York. Accessed June 2009. http:// www.york.ac.uk/admin/presspr/pressreleases/disabilityhistory.htm. Gaucher, Guy. 1973. The Passion of Thérèse of Lisieux. Trans. Anne Marie Brennan. New York: Crossroad. George, Robert P. 1993. Making Men Moral. Oxford: Oxford University Press. George, Robert P., and Christopher Tollefsen. 2008. Embryo: A Defense of Human Life. New York: Doubleday. Giloteaux, Paulin. 1927. Victim Souls. Benziger Brothers, out of print. Hanisch, Halvor. 2007. “Review of Martha Nussbaum’s Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, and Species Membership.” Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research 9.2: 133–36. John Paul II. 1981. “The International Year of Disabled Persons.” Washington, D.C.: National Catholic Office for Persons with Disabilities. Kane, Paula M. 2002. “‘She Offered Herself Up’: The Victim Soul and Victim Spirituality in Catholicism.” Church History 71.1 (March): 80–119. Lamey, Andy. 2007. Review of Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, and Species Membership by Martha Nussbaum. Philosophical Books 48.4 (October): 376–82. Levenson, Michael. 2008. “Bid to Canonize Girl Draws Mixed Reaction: Skeptics Question Claims of Miracles.” Boston Globe, October 13. Accessed November 2009. http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/10/13/bid_to_canonize_ girl_draws_mixed_reaction/?s_campaign=8315. Little Audrey Santo Foundation. N.d. “Price List.” Accessed November 2009. http://www.littleaudreysanto.org/Item_List.htm. Mayeski, Marie Anne. 2001. “Women and Their Mothers: Rejecting and Reclaiming the Tradition of the Saints.” Anglican Theological Review 83.2 (Spring). McFeely, Tom. 2007. “Disabling Details: new U.N. Treaty Promotes Abortion, Says Vatican.” National Catholic Register, February 20, 2007. Accessed January 2010. http://www.neregister.com/site/article/disabling-details/ McNulty, Dennis C. 2009. “Church Access for Persons with Disabilities: Catholic Teachings, Practical Suggestions and Resources.” Accessed January 2010. http://www.catholicdisabilityteachings.com/Need%20to%20be%20written/ Misc%20Resources.htm. Miller, Lisa. 2010. “What Would Mary Do? A Woman’s Place Is in the Church.” Newsweek, April 12. Accessed May 2010. http://www.newsweek. com/2010/04/02/a-woman-s-place-is-in-the-church.html.

Mothers, Children with Disability, and Postmodern Sainthood 125 Mulcahy, C. 1909. “St. Germaine Cousin.” In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Accessed November 2009. http://www. newadvent.org/cathen/06474a.htm. Nussbaum, Martha. 2006. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, and Species Membership. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. O’Malley, Vincent J. 1999. Ordinary Suffering of Extraordinary Saints. Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor. Petroff, Elizabeth Alvilda, ed. 1986. Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. Pham, Chris. 2009. “Little Audrey Santo’s Mother to Appear on Catholic TV Talk Show to Discuss Beatification.” Catholic Exchange, June 22, 1. Accessed December 2009. http://www.catholic.org/prwire/headline.php?ID=7072 Reilly, Daniel P. 1999. “Diocese Issues Interim Findings on Miraculous Claims: Statement by Most. Rev. Daniel P. Reilly, Bishop of Worchester.” Worcester, MA: CESNUR, Center for Studies on New Religions. Accessed November 2009. http://www.cesnur.org/testi/Worcester.htm. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Carolyn Sargent, eds. 1999. “Institutionalized Sex Abuse and the Catholic Church.” In Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tench, Megan. 2007. “A Tearful Farewell to Little Audrey.” Boston Globe, April 19. http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/04/19/a_tearful_farewell_ to_little_audrey/. St. Teresa of Avila. 1950. The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus. Trans. and ed. E. Allison Peers. Westminster: Newman. Tollefsen, Christopher. 2009. “Disability and Social Justice.” Unpublished manuscript. United Nations General Assembly. 2006. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Accessed June 2010. http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/enable/rights/ ahcfi nalrepe.htm. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. 1995. Guidelines for Celebration of the Sacraments with Persons with Disabilities. Washington, D.C.: National Catholic Office for Persons with Disabilities. . 1999. Pastoral Statement of U.S. Catholic Bishops on People with Disabilities. Washington, DC: National Catholic Office for Persons with Disabilities. 1978 version ed. George Kuryvial, updated 1989 and 1999. Accessed November 2009. Accessed February 2010. http://www.ncpd.org/views-news-policy/policy/ church/bishops/pastoral . 2008. “The Bishops Pastoral Statement on People with Disabilities at 30: Bright Past, Bold Future.” Webinar and toolkit, August 13. Accessed January 2010. http://www.ncpd.org/webinars/2008–08–13. Vatican Committee for the Jubilee Day of the Community with Persons with Disabilities. 2000. “The Person with Disabilities: The Duties of the Civil and Ecclesial Community.” Accessed November 2009. http://www.vatican.va/ jubilee_2000/jubilevents/jub_disabled_20001203_scheda5_en.htm. Weingarten, Gene. 1998. “Tears for Audrey.” Washington Post, July 19. Accessed May 2010. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/features/santo.htm. Westen, John-Henry. 2006. “Vatican Refuses to Sign UN Disabilities Rights Treaty over Pro-Abortion Language.” Accessed January 2010. http://www.lifesitenews. com/ldn/2006/dec/06121406.html.

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Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Dynamics of Mothering a Daughter Alison Stone

THE DYNAMICS OF MOTHERING A DAUGHTER

INTRODUCTION Does the experience of being the mother of a daughter differ in kind from that of being the mother of a son? Do mothers feel systematically different towards girls and boys? If so, what are some features that distinguish mothers’ lived relations to their daughters? These are the issues I explore in this chapter. I do so by rereading the work of feminist psychoanalytic thinkers, who have suggested that mother-daughter relations tend to involve close identification and to be especially ambivalent, as mother and daughter seek to reassert their boundaries. I will depart from this psychoanalytic work by focusing on mothers’ lived experiences of these relations rather than on the effects of mothers’ attitudes upon their daughters. I will also depart from the psychoanalytic tendency to consider motherdaughter relations problematic and more or less pathological because of their levels of identification and ambivalence. Instead, I shall suggest that in these very respects mother-daughter relations can be a source of creative transformation on the part of mothers. This is because relations with daughters, who are female bodied, can remind mothers especially acutely of their past dependency on and bodily entwinement with their own mothers. This recalls mothers to aspects of human life that our patriarchal culture represses and devalues: dependency, relationality, and embodiment. Thus, mothering a daughter can prompt mothers to reevaluate these aspects of life and try to incorporate and learn from them.

GENERALIZING ABOUT GENDER DIFFERENCES Surprisingly, many feminist theorists of mothering sidestep these issues by discussing relations between mothers, defi ned as necessarily biological women, and “children” in the neutral. Thus in Maternal Encounters Lisa Baraitser writes that she “use[s] the maternal to signify any relation of obligation between an adult who identifies as female, and another person whom that adult elects as their ‘child’ . . . [an] other whom they name and

The Dynamics of Mothering a Daughter 127 claim as their child” (2009, 22). On this view mothers relate to “children,” not to “sons” and/or “daughters.” Yet it might seem obvious that mothers would feel differently about differently sexed children, as mothers not only inhabit a social world that marks sex as immensely significant but also relate to their children against the background of their past histories of interactions with others, interactions throughout which sexual difference has played a crucial role. In particular, given the gendered division of labor, almost all mothers were cared for in their childhoods by women, often their biological mothers. Surely then, we might think, there must be considerable differences between the patterns of fantasy, affect, desire, and memory with which mothers respond to girls and boys. Many psychoanalytic thinkers, feminist and nonfeminist, argue that these differences do exist. On their view, each mother’s personality is the sedimentation of her past relations with others, past relations shaped above all by her formative ties with her immediate family—in families where, for all their variety, women have generally been the principal child-carers while men were relatively distant. Consequently, infant boys and girls arouse different memories and patterns of affect and response in their mothers. Psychoanalytic thinkers have explored these differences. Here, I reexamine their work to see what it tells us about the distinctive, sexually specific features of the experience of mothering daughters (especially young daughters of preschool age). However, this means rereading this work against the grain because psychoanalytic theorists have focused on how mothers’ feelings shape their behavior toward their daughters and thereby shape daughters’ gender-specific personality structures. Maternal feeling has been studied largely from the perspective of its impact on daughters, not in its own right. I shall try to reorient the psychoanalytic work that I examine toward the quality and lived experience of maternal feeling. There is a second problem. Psychoanalytic thinkers have tended to find mother-daughter relations more or less pathological or problematic compared to mother-son relations. When mother-daughter relations have been identified as distinctive, they have frequently been downgraded as inferior, and the impact of these relations on daughters has been deemed to be generally adverse or debilitating. Consequently, some feminist authors, such as Roszika Parker (2005, ch. 9), express caution about attempts to generalize about differences between mother-daughter and mother-son relations. As Parker notes, some empirical research (e.g., McGuire 1991, 160) has found that mothers are more ambivalent about daughters than sons: mothers relate to daughters in a more conflicted, tense, and controlling way. But, Parker points out, many other variables besides sex shape mothers’ attitudes toward their children. These variables include children’s physical appearance, health and ability levels, ethnic and racial features, and birth order. For instance, the mother of fi rst a son, then a daughter might well have a more intensely charged and confl icted relation with her son; here,

128 Alison Stone birth order overrides sex in significance. Even when other factors do not thus override sex, they at least inflect it (Parker 2005, 280), so that mothers never respond to sex in isolation. Although multiple intersecting factors always shape mothers’ relations to their children, this is compatible with there being a general tendency for mothers—other things being equal—to feel, for example, more ambivalent about daughters than sons. Because other factors are always in play, no individual mother-daughter relation will ever embody this (or any other) tendency perfectly, so mother-daughter relations will not take one single invariant form. Even so, we can identify general tendencies for mothers’ patterns of feeling toward their daughters and sons to diverge along particular pathways. Indeed, psychoanalytic theory suggests these differential tendencies must arise because mothers typically have had markedly different past relations to maternal and paternal figures (Horney 1967). However, Parker raises a second reason to be cautious about generalizing. She argues that mothers never respond to children solely in terms of their biological sex because mothers’ responses are always shaped by their entire unconscious histories (2005, 301). Contrary to Parker, I suggest that it is precisely because of the maternal unconscious that mothers will tend to respond differently to differently sexed children, encountering their children’s sex not as sheer biological fact but in the context of a relational history structured, asymmetrically, around sexual difference. So I persist in trying to generalize about distinctive patterns in maternal relations to daughters—although I understand these patterns only as general tendencies, not invariant universals. Moreover, contrary to much of the psychoanalytic tradition, I shall argue that the distinctive features of mother-daughter relations give them distinctive value rather than render them pathological or problematic. This value is to confront us with aspects of human life—our dependency and embodiment—that are often neglected. This confrontation may be difficult, but equally may be creative, motivating mothers toward psychical, cultural, and perhaps even social change.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND MOTHER-DAUGHTER FUSION Freud himself said notoriously little about motherhood beyond stating that a woman’s motivation to become a mother is to acquire in her baby a substitute for the penis she lacks (1977a, 340). In effect, for Freud, women seek power over their babies and power over others through their babies to compensate for their lack of “phallic” power in the wider world. However, Freud’s broader account of femininity provides the basis for a richer, more complex picture of maternal experience. Freud initially assumed that little boys and girls develop inversely symmetrical Oedipus complexes in which they love their opposite-sexed parents and hate and compete with their same-sexed parents. Freud then realized

The Dynamics of Mothering a Daughter 129 that, actually, both girls and boys begin life loving their mothers (1977a, 334). The boy’s love develops at around age three into the Oedipus complex, which he abandons around age five when threatened with castration. The girl’s early love for her mother, in contrast, is abandoned when the girl discovers her own and her mother’s castration and blames her mother for it, in this light retrospectively blaming her mother for all the other disappointments that the girl has undergone: weaning, toilet-training, the arrival of siblings, and so on. Now hating her mother, the girl breaks from her, by extension becoming contemptuous of other women too, and taking her father as her new love, wanting to gain access through him to the penis. From then on the girl’s position is Oedipal—loving her father, hating her mother. However, in his essays “Female Sexuality” and “Femininity” (Freud 1973, 1977b), fi rst published in 1931 and 1933, Freud suggested that little girls’ early, “pre-Oedipal” love for their mothers cannot be completely renounced because that love is so powerful and exclusive. (Freud claims that father figures have little significance during girls’ fi rst few years.) At around age four or five little girls therefore repress, but cannot destroy, their love for their mothers. Being repressed, this love remains psychically active, constantly pressing toward consciousness. It even shapes women’s attachments to their fathers and other men, through which women restage and recapitulate their repressed relations with their mothers. A woman’s bond with her mother thus remains an overwhelmingly important force in her psychical life. Freud’s late recognition (prompted by his female coworkers) of the key importance of women’s pre-Oedipal period underpins Helene Deutsch’s huge study, Motherhood. Although it receives little attention today, this work laid the foundations for subsequent feminist psychoanalytic work on mothering. For Deutsch, a woman’s desire to mother rests not primarily on her Oedipal wish for the penis but on her wish to return, in fantasy, to the early conditions of her life “in which the split between the ego and the nonego [did] not exist” (1945, 279). In her infancy, the mother had loved herself and her own mother indistinguishably. By now loving her child as herself—fi rst in pregnancy and then postnatally, in the state of emotional fusion that Deutsch calls the “psychic umbilical cord” (1945, 278)—the mother simultaneously regresses, in fantasy, to her early loving identification with her own mother. Motherhood thus expresses and fulfills the mother’s repressed pre-Oedipal feelings (1945, 154). By merging with her child, she reunites with her own long-lost mother. However, Deutsch maintains, the mother must eventually resurface from this fantasized mergence so that her child can separate and she can resume normal social life. This is emotionally very difficult for any mother—more so if she has a girl. According to Deutsch, mothers’ fears of separation from their daughters are usually more intense and prolonged than those about separating from their sons (1945, 321–22). This is because of the mother’s “unmastered tie to her own mother” that the daughter, being female like the

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mother’s mother, elicits in an especially strong, less easily mastered form. Because maternal fusion with sons is never so complete, it is relatively easily relinquished. As one of the psychoanalyst Estela Welldon’s patients put it, “I feel so relieved that a boy was born, I now know that he will be able to distance himself from me. Becoming independent will be an easier task for him than if I had had a girl” (1992, 53). Conversely, mothers tend to cling more to their daughters and discourage them from becoming separate—to be overprotective, overaffectionate, and overnurturing. Deutsch notes that this mother-daughter identification enables daughters to mother by regressing to these early bonds. But Deutsch emphasizes the dangers of mother-daughter identification. The daughter may fail to become autonomous, remaining debilitatingly dependent on her mother for her support, approval, and direction. Both may be excessively anxious about any manifestation of separateness or hostility between them. And insofar as she fails to separate, the mother will fail to resume interests and activities outside motherhood, activities that are symbolically masculine and hence crucial to her self-esteem (insofar as she has entered the Oedipal position and so come to place primary value upon men and the masculine). Underlying these warnings is Deutsch’s broader view that maternal relations are inherently dangerous (Kaplan 1992). These relations dissolve boundaries between selves, interfering with mothers’ and children’s autonomy. For Deutsch, good mothers help their children to escape this danger by repressing their pre-Oedipal desire for fusion and imposing distance. Pre-Oedipal longing for the mother may always resist repression, then, but equally for Deutsch it must always be repressed. Mother-daughter identification, however, is distinctively resistant to the imposition of boundaries; in Deutsch’s picture, mother-daughter relations are never far from pathology.

CHODOROW, FLAX, AND MATERNAL AMBIVALENCE Nancy Chodorow’s hugely influential book The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) takes up Deutsch’s theme of mother-daughter mergence but transforms her largely negative value judgments. Reemphasizing the positive dimensions of this mergence, Chodorow makes it the repository of neglected virtues and values of care, empathy, and relationality. Chodorow’s starting point is the social fact that “women mother”: in almost all societies, the material care and nurturance of young children falls almost exclusively upon women’s shoulders. Consequently, all infants begin life “matrisexual” (1978, 95), erotically loving the mothers who tend them. Psychically fused with their mothers, they experience the mothers’ feelings as theirs and theirs as the mothers’. For Chodorow, the mother reciprocates this during the fi rst months of the infant’s life: she regresses into the fusion that she herself underwent as an infant, which enables her to empathize with and care for the needy infant. Gradually, by age three,

The Dynamics of Mothering a Daughter 131 children achieve individuation, becoming aware of their own bodily boundaries and feelings as distinct from those of others and from the outer world, while mothers also return to individuation. Or rather, mothers do so in principle; in practice, this return is much less clear-cut in relation to daughters, Chodorow argues (following Deutsch). Rather than emerging from symbiosis, mothers tend to remain in it with daughters and to discourage their daughters from individuating. Mothers unconsciously identify with their daughters, projecting their interests, desires, beliefs, and feelings onto their daughters until they come to feel like mere extensions of their mothers, with little sense of unique individuality. Conversely, Chodorow argues, mothers unconsciously push their sons toward separation, and—as Chodorow takes it—being heterosexual, mothers “sexualize” and act seductively toward their sons (1978, 104). This establishes the boy’s Oedipus complex, in which he competes against his father for his mother, fi nally resolving the crisis by identifying with his father in his abstract role and repudiating his early closeness to his mother. His core masculine self becomes centered on separateness from the mother, the body, emotions, and relations with others. Girls likewise turn to their fathers to break from their suffocating lack of differentiation from their mothers. Fathers become “symbols of freedom” from the mother (1978, 121); this, for Chodorow, lays the basis of female heterosexuality. However, Chodorow argues (again following Deutsch), the girl’s turn to her father reflects not only her urge to escape and reject her mother, but also her ongoing preoccupation with and love of her mother (1978, 124–25). She needs to escape her mother only because of her mother’s powerful emotional hold. Being thus rooted in love for her mother, the girl’s love for her father cannot supplant it, and her love for her mother continues. The female emotional world takes a triangular shape, typically involving both sexual love of the father/men and deeper fusional love for the mother/women (1978, 127). Thus, Chodorow argues that although most women become heterosexual, they retain a deeper emotional orientation toward other women. This means that although most women enter into relationships with men, they can rarely fulfill with men their need for love of a deep, intimate, identificatory kind, and so women come to want children with whom they can regain that intimacy (1978, 201–4). Chodorow reevaluates mother-daughter bonds as bonds of support, sympathy, and care. For her, the “relational,” empathetic form of self produced in women by these bonds has distinctive virtues: it enables women to care, empathize, relate to others, and admit and respond to dependency. Nonetheless, Chodorow is not wholly positive about the feminine self or the mother-daughter relations that shape it. Negatively, women’s relational selves incline them to be overly dependent on others and to get immediately caught up in others’ feelings, whereas mother-daughter bonds tend to involve daughters feeling dominated or overwhelmed by their mothers. Even so, these problems do not render mother-daughter relations inferior

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to mother-son relations. From Chodorow’s perspective, these latter have their own problems of excessive distance: mothers and sons often struggle to relate to or communicate with one another across the chasm created by the son’s process of separation. Chodorow’s focus is on how mothers’ feelings shape children’s emerging personalities so that girls become disposed toward mothering and boys toward paid work in the public arena. But as Chodorow notes, the lived quality of the mother’s feelings, as they differ regarding sons and daughters, can be elicited from her theory (2000, 348). Specifically, it seems— although Chodorow does not explicitly say so—that having a girl child would tend to elicit an especially intense regression to symbiosis on the mother’s part, because the girl shares the sex of the mother’s mother. Hence the mother’s special reluctance to relinquish this symbiosis. Moreover, having a daughter would seem especially emotionally satisfying for a mother because it enables her more fully to return to the symbiotic and empathetic state that she (unconsciously) wants out of mothering. However, Chodorow’s picture of mother-daughter relations contains a major inconsistency here. On her account, although women value their symbiotic bonds with their mothers, these bonds also leave women unpleasantly dominated by their mothers, from whom men offer liberation. If having a daughter potentially provokes a more intense return to symbiosis, then presumably mothers will tend to fi nd this threatening to their relations with men and the masculine world and to their separate selfhood and freedom. The daughter’s needs may seem overwhelming, her demands tyrannical. This seems to be borne out in Jacqueline McGuire’s study, in which mothers with daughters were relatively critical of and irritated by each other’s demands, while mothers with sons were more relaxed, less controlling, and “made more allowances” for sons (McGuire 1991, 160). A recent survey conducted by the Netmums website came to virtually identical conclusions (Netmums 2010). Rather than merging more profoundly with daughters, mothers will tend to react against the especially deep threat of mergence posed by a daughter: ultimately, Chodorow’s theory appears to imply that mothers will tend to merge less with daughters than sons. Jane Flax argues exactly this, as do Luise Eichenbaum and Susie Orbach (1983). Flax argues that having daughters provokes more internal conflict in mothers: “As a result . . . it is more difficult for the mother to be as emotionally available as her daughter needs her to be” (1978, 175). In particular, Flax argues that daughters arouse more awareness in mothers of their unfulfi lled girlhood wishes for nurturance from their own mothers because daughters, being female, remind mothers more intensely of their past relations with their own mothers. Unconsciously, the mother directs these reawakened wishes toward her daughter, demanding that her daughter care for her and not vice versa. In addition, mothers are more resistant to bodily and emotional intimacy with a baby girl because mothers have learned to favor men over women, emotionally and often

The Dynamics of Mothering a Daughter 133 sexually. Mothers recoil against the prospect of symbiosis with daughters, as they do not with sons. The result is that typically girls do not feel they have been adequately nurtured by their mothers, whereas boys do. Hence, rather than proceeding to separate and become autonomous as boys do, girls remain attached to their mothers and then turn away in disappointment toward men, all the time searching—unsuccessfully—for the nurturance they have missed. What keeps daughters dependent on their mothers and others, Flax concludes, is not experienced symbiosis but an unmet need for symbiosis that drives daughters ultimately to become mothers and to reproduce the whole cycle. Flax, Eichenbaum, and Orbach identify mother-daughter relations as distinctive in their tendency toward ambivalence, conflict, and tension. But in this respect they fi nd these relations defective and problematic: their ambivalence is deemed damaging to daughters and unpleasant and undesirable for mothers. It is striking that whereas Deutsch found mother-daughter relations dangerous because of their “excessively strong tie” (1945, 322), Flax, Eichenbaum, and Orbach fi nd these relations problematic because they are not symbiotic enough. Either way, these relations are judged inferior to mother-son relations. Flax’s, and Eichenbaum and Orbach’s changed assessment of the problems peculiar to mother-daughter relations rests on a new conception of the ideal mother. No longer relatively distant as she was for Deutsch, the ideal mother is now selflessly empathetic and boundlessly available. Supporting this ideal is an assumption that maternal ambivalence is damaging to children and undesirable for mothers. But is it? Roszika Parker (2005) argues not. First, some level of maternal ambivalence toward children is unavoidable and entirely normal. Mothers cannot but be aware of the conflicts between their own needs and wishes and those of their children, and between their desires to be with their children and to pursue other activities and relationships. Indeed, ultimately mothers cannot avoid having conflicting emotions toward their children because ambivalence, the polar conjunction of love and hate, is the fundament of psychical life (for Parker, following Melanie Klein). Second, some level of maternal ambivalence is beneficial, not harmful, to children: its expression encourages children to become responsible, to learn that not all their demands can reasonably be met, to learn to show care and empathy for others, and to appreciate the mother’s independent existence as a real other with emotions of her own. As Renata Salecl remarks, “a mother’s ambivalent attitude . . . opens space for children to distance themselves from the mother and thus acquire [a] certain ‘freedom’” (2004, 118). Third, Parker argues that although ambivalence is undeniably difficult to experience, it is a positive, creative force for mothers (as long as it can be acknowledged and lived with, not repressed so that it returns in unmanageable form). Ambivalence motivates mothers to develop emotionally: to work toward integrating their confl icting feelings, to create new psychical configurations in order to do so, and to articulate

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the meaning of their experiences in new ways. Ambivalence guides mothers to engage in a creative process of development and self-transformation. This suggests that if mothers do tend to be more ambivalent toward daughters than sons, it need not be negative for mothers or for daughters. It can aid daughters in their ethical development and can stimulate creative development in mothers. In the next section I offer some suggestions about how maternal ambivalence toward daughters might stimulate a particular pattern of maternal development, building on the various psychoanalytic theories I have discussed so far.

MATERNAL PAST, CULTURAL PRESENT To build on these theories I must address a problem with the psychoanalytic idea that mothers and babies undergo psychical mergence. Recent infancy researchers such as Daniel Stern (1985) deny that there is any symbiotic phase. According to the theory of symbiosis, most fully articulated by psychologist Margaret Mahler, babies spend their fi rst eight months in an undifferentiated continuum with their mothers before beginning to separate and individuate, while mothers likewise regress to symbiosis during this early period (Mahler et al. 1975, 44–51). Chodorow, Flax, Eichenbaum, and Orbach all accept this theory, which is itself only the articulation of broader ideas of mother-child fusion or identification widely held by twentieth-century psychoanalysts. But Stern establishes that directly from birth, babies begin to form a core sense of self, which they achieve by six months: an integrated sense of agency, coherence, affectivity, and experiential continuity (1985, 71). Because babies form this sense of self only through the agency of an other—usually the mother—who regulates their experiences, babies simultaneously form the sense of a core other. Their sense of self is intrinsically a sense of self-with-this-other, not of being an isolated monad. What has misleadingly been called merger, Stern argues, is this infantile “way of being with someone . . . who acts as a self-regulating other” (1985, 109). Infants do not live indistinguishably fused with their mothers but with them as real others, others with whom, however, infants remain constitutively connected: the infant world is one of relationality, not mergence. This obliges us to reformulate feminist psychoanalytic ideas about how sexual difference shapes children’s early relations to their mothers. Let us suppose that—generally, given the gendered division of labor—infants start life in a context of intense and almost constant being-with their mothers (and/or other women as mother-substitute figures). For boys, this relational constitution of the self-with-mother comes into conflict with the culturally imposed requirement to assume a male gender identity. Boys have to identify with—to model themselves upon, imitate, and incorporate the habits and dispositions of—men and fathers as distinct from mothers. Consequently,

The Dynamics of Mothering a Daughter 135 as boys enter language and culture and come to appreciate how male identity is defi ned, they are forced to break emotionally from their mothers and their early relational mode of existence. To reinforce their precarious distance from that previous mode, boys then tend to attach near exclusive value to paternal and male qualities of autonomy and separateness, defi ning them in hierarchical contrast to relationality cast as maternal and female. Under the resulting patriarchal value-system, girls in turn become constrained to relate ambivalently to their mothers, although early maternal relatedness supports rather than confl icts with female gender identity. Nonetheless, as girls learn to speak and to understand the meanings of their culture, they learn on myriad levels that everything masculine has greater value. Girls’ relational ties with their mothers thereby become infused with negative value: girls come to experience these ties as a source of dependency, dragging them down into the realms of matter not mind, emotions not reason, body not spirit, and so on. This motivates girls to reject their mothers and turn toward men. Yet girls’ early bonds with their mothers are too deeply constitutive of their psyches, including their female identities, to be entirely rejected. Girls retain these attachments, but now always with a negative coloring, as attachments that hold them back and stifle them despite—indeed, because of—the care and closeness they involve. So, for a woman to become a mother is not to regress into symbiosis. Rather, it is to experience an “upsurge of forgotten body relationships” with the mother’s own mother (Beardsworth 2004, 263). Upon becoming a mother, one returns to, remembers, and relives one’s early intense experiences of being-with one’s mother. In particular, what surges up is the quality of early being-with the mother as it was before it succumbed to patriarchal interpretation and devaluation. This is because the mother’s relation to a new baby is (perhaps uniquely) immediately corporeal, sensuous, tactile, and nonverbal, suffused with scarcely articulable emotional depth. The sensory experiences unique to this relation—its special smells (milk, spit-up, poo), sounds (cries, gurgles, giggles), feels (the softness of the baby’s skin and hair) arouse in the mother varying levels of memory of her preverbal bodily past. If all babies trigger in their mothers some resurgence of this early mode of maternal-related experience, then there are reasons to think this will tend to be most intensely true of daughters. Mother-son relations are sensuous and corporeal, but the mother is always relating to a valued and beloved male child against the backdrop of a culture that assigns superior value to males. As such, mother-son relations remain in principle consistent with the patriarchal terms of reference that mothers have come to accept and with which their early pre-Oedipal experiences have been overlaid. At their best, therefore, mother-son relations can integrate the pre-Oedipal maternal elements of the mother’s past into its Oedipal paternal elements. This infuses the latter with new depth and emotional richness, reconciling the two strata of the mother’s mental history.

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In contrast, the relation to a young daughter, as an immediate body-tobody relation between two females, will tend to call the mother back to her early relation with her mother as it was when it was not yet mediated by any significant relations to men. The mother is pulled back into her pre-Oedipal past in a more direct way, into a mode of experience that historically precedes—and that is felt emotionally and sensuously to exceed—the patriarchal frameworks that were subsequently infused into it. The tendency is for the mother to reexperience her maternal past specifically as dissonant with respect to patriarchy, not reconciled with it but eluding its male-oriented terms of reference and value. Plausibly, this means that having a daughter will tend to involve a mother in greater emotional difficulty than having a son because it entails more psychical reorientation and thus more loss of mental equilibrium on her part. Maternal past and patriarchal present are experienced as two heterogeneous registers between which the mother is divided. Moreover, insofar as the mother of a daughter tends to reexperience her own early maternal relatedness as exceeding or defying meaningful articulation, this kind of experience will potentially be harder to understand—more emotionally chaotic and troublingly removed from accepted frameworks of meaning. But the typical maternal reaction need not be to recoil from daughters as Flax claims. Instead, mothers may well feel torn between trying to make sense of their new experiences in familiar, negative, patriarchal terms—as threatening, uncontrollable, chaotic, and so on—and between staying with these experiences precisely as they elude clear articulation. If a mother can live with this tension, a distinct form of creative development might be engendered, one in which she seeks to transform, reinterpret, and revalue cultural resources so that they give her maternal experience expression. But for that experience to be expressed in its elusive, dissonant character, it must remain heterogeneous to cultural forms, intersecting with them but retaining a level of irreducibility to meaning, a dimension of sheer sensuous materiality. This kind of maternal development is toward acknowledging and living with the irreducible presence of materiality in its difference from meaning, and fi nding new ways to make meaning that can convey this material presence in its heterogeneity.

CONCLUSION The difficulty of mother-daughter relations, then, can be a vital source of cultural renewal and transformation. Rather than rendering these relations pathological or problematic, this difficulty arises because these relations unearth dimensions of life that have been systematically repressed and devalued under patriarchy—the sensuous and corporeal roots of existence and meaning, the context of maternal relationality and dependence in which our lives take shape. The difficulty of mothering a daughter, then,

The Dynamics of Mothering a Daughter 137 is creative rather than paralyzing. At its best, this difficulty can motivate mothers to recover and revalue their repressed maternal past and to bring that past into the present and future of cultural life.

WORKS CITED Baraitser, Lisa. 2009. Maternal Encounters. London: Routledge. Beardsworth, Sara. 2004. Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Chodorow, Nancy. 1978. The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley: University of California Press. . 2000. “Reflections on The Reproduction of Mothering: Twenty Years Later.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 1.4: 337–48. Deutsch, Helene. 1945. Psychology of Women. Vol. 2, Motherhood. New York: Bantam / Grune and Stratton. Eichenbaum, Luise, and Susie Orbach. 1983. Understanding Women. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Flax, Jane. 1978. “The Confl ict between Nurturance and Autonomy in MotherDaughter Relationships and within Feminism.” Feminist Studies 4.2: 171–89. Freud, Sigmund. 1973. “Femininity.” In New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, 145–69. Harmondsworth: Penguin. . 1977a. “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes.” In On Sexuality, ed. Angela Richards, 323–43. Harmondsworth: Penguin. . 1977b. “Female Sexuality.” In On Sexuality, ed. Angela Richards, 371–92. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Horney, Karen. 1967. “Maternal Confl icts.” In Feminine Psychology. New York: Norton. Kaplan, E. Ann. 1992. Motherhood and Representation. London: Routledge. Mahler, Margaret S., Fred Pine, and Anni Bergman. 1975. The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant. New York: Basic. McGuire, Jacqueline. 1991. “Sons and Daughters.” In Motherhood: Meanings, Practices and Ideologies, ed. Ann Phoenix, Anne Woollett, and Eva Lloyd, 143–61. London: Sage. Netmums. 2010. “Sugar and Spice and Nothing Nice? Mums Are More Critical of Their Daughters.” Accessed October 21, 2010. http://www.netmums.com/coffeehouse/general-coffeehouse-chat-514/news-current-affairs-topical-discussion12/479453-sugar-spice-nothing-nice-mums-more-critical-their-daughters.html. Parker, Roszika. 2005. Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence. 2nd ed. London: Virago. Salecl, Renata. 2004. On Anxiety. London: Routledge. Stern, Daniel. 1985. The Interpersonal World of the Infant. London: Karnac. Welldon, Estela. 1992. Mother, Madonna, Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood. London: Karnac.

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Why Don’t Philosophers Tell Their Mothers’ Stories? Philosophy, Motherhood, and Imaginative Resistance Joshua Shaw

INTRODUCTION This chapter begins and ends with phone calls with my mother. It was inspired by a conversation with her that convinced me there is something philosophically interesting about my observation that male philosophers don’t reflect on motherhood. I make my case for this claim and reflect on my conversation with my mother in this chapter. More specifically, I develop a theory about why male philosophers fi nd it difficult to philosophize about maternity. I intended to put it into practice by encouraging my mother to talk about her experiences of maternity with me. I found, however, that I needed to revise my conclusion after my wife became pregnant, which coincidentally occurred shortly after I fi nished a fi rst draft of this chapter. This chapter ends not with an image of me talking with my mother but of overhearing frequent conversations about maternity between my wife and mother, conversations that led me to revise my perspective on the obstacles that keep male philosophers from appreciating women’s experiences of pregnancy and motherhood. I reflect on these conversations in the last section.

WHERE ARE THE MOTHERS IN WESTERN PHILOSOPHY? There is a long tradition in Western philosophy of philosophers philosophizing about fatherhood. The idea of God being the father of creation plays a key role in some strands of Christian philosophic theology, for example, in which it is argued that there is no contradiction between faith and acknowledging human suffering because God is the father of creation and a good father may allow his children to suffer. There is also a tradition of using fatherhood to reflect on ethical responsibility. Think of Kierkegaard’s analysis of the Abraham and Isaac story in Fear and Trembling, in which Abraham’s fatherhood exemplifies ethics and his willingness to sacrifice Isaac exemplifies the “teleological suspension of the ethical” (Kierkegaard

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2006, 46–59). There is also a tradition of likening rationality with fatherhood, such as when Aristotle writes in the Nicomachean Ethics that the appetitive part of the soul “listens to reason as one would listen to a father” (Aristotle 1962, 32). Finally, it is not uncommon to depict the history of ideas as a series of father-son relationships. Harold Bloom proposes that the history of literature can be understood as a series of confl icted Oedipal relationships, with “belated” poets learning from “patriarchal” poets yet resenting their precedence; in philosophy, we similarly speak of a figure such as Descartes as being the “father of modern philosophy” and depict modern philosophy as a series of reactions to his paternal authority. There is a tradition, then, of philosophers philosophizing about fatherhood. Yet they seem to be oddly unwilling to philosophize about motherhood. Indeed, there are relatively few philosophical writings on motherhood at all. There have been notable recent publications, such as Joyce Trebilcot’s collection Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory (1983), Sarah Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking (1989), and Eva Kittay’s Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependence (1998). Nonetheless, it is difficult to think of philosophers who have reflected on motherhood at length prior to the past thirty to fifty years, at least among canonical figures in philosophy. Virtually all philosophers who have taken motherhood as a topic worthy of sustained and serious inquiry have been women philosophers. Male philosophers have tended to balk at this challenge even when their arguments require it. For example, Socrates famously proposes in the Symposium that the essence of love is found in procreation. After refuting his interlocutors’ theories about love, he explains how a woman, Diotima, taught him that love’s goal is to “procreate and bring forth in beauty” and that procreation is love’s object because it is “the nearest thing to perpetuity and immortality that a moral being can attain” (Plato 1951, 87). This looks at fi rst like a progressive moment in the history of philosophy; here is Socrates, the “father of Western philosophy,” crediting a woman with teaching him about love, and even better, he presents her as drawing on a female experience, pregnancy, to correct his misunderstanding. As a feminist, someone troubled by the absence of women’s perspectives in philosophy, it is difficult for me to read this passage without getting goose bumps. However, Plato then makes an odd move. He proposes that best way to understood procreation is not to reflect on procreation—on pregnancy. Instead, he maintains that procreation is best exemplified in the creation of poetry and laws out of dialogue. Poetry and law—and public dialogue, generally speaking—were of course exclusively male activities at the time. It is easy to overlook the bizarreness of this move. Suppose I am asked to imagine what it is like for my wife, who is currently pregnant, to be pregnant. She tells me that her back aches and her feet are very swollen. To try to grasp what it is like for her to be pregnant, I might begin by imagining undergoing similar aches and pains. Of course, it is sometimes said that the experience of being pregnant is ineffable. Yet even this ineffability is, I take

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it, open to some level of comprehension: it is not wholly and completely inexplicable. Language allows women to tell men, perhaps via analogies and metaphors, the nature of some of the experiences involved. So, perhaps pregnancy is more like the incomprehensibility of powerful sensory experiences, such as intense pain, than it is like pondering an infi nitely large number. I might use various strategies to reflect on what it is like to be pregnant. My fi rst step would be to converse with people who have or who are experiencing the phenomenon—mothers and pregnant women. It wouldn’t occur to me to sidestep such consultations and to instead contemplate how pregnancy might be like some exclusively male activities. In the Symposium, love is illuminatingly compared to pregnancy, but Plato feels compelled to purge this comparison of its gendered associations by recomparing pregnancy to masculine creative activities.1 There is something odd about the hesitancy among male philosophers to reflect on motherhood. Not only is it difficult to fi nd discussions about motherhood in philosophy: philosophers shy away from doing so even when fully pursuing their own arguments would require it. One might argue that there is an obvious explanation for why philosophers have not philosophized about motherhood. Until fairly recently, philosophers were all men. Women have been excluded from philosophy, and one could argue that it is unsurprising that men should construct their theories with an eye toward their own interests, hence that they would ignore women’s experiences, such as their experiences of pregnancy and mothering. This seems to be a reasonable explanation for why there is so little discussion about motherhood in philosophy. The absence of such discussions is surely symptomatic of the broader exclusion of women from philosophy. Nonetheless, I have two reasons for questioning this explanation. First, philosophers are notorious for engaging in thought experiments that require them to imagine themselves to be other, often drastically other, than they are. Consider some questions posed in introductory philosophy classes: What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to be a brain in a vat—a consciousness without a body? What is like to be a body without a consciousness—a zombie? What is it be like to be God—an all-powerful, all-knowing being existing outside of time? What would it be like to be an alien arriving on Earth? Or consider the thought experiments philosophers love to ponder: What if I was born blind but regained vision later in life, could I recognize the color red as red? What if I awoke with a famous violinist attached to me for her life support? What if all of my body’s parts were replaced, one after another, with cybernetic hardware without any interruptions in consciousness; would I still be the same me? In short, philosophers love to contemplate thought experiments that force them to flex their imaginative muscles, and they frequently rely heavily on such games of make believe to clarify their beliefs and test their intuitions about the world and themselves. This reliance on creative acts of imagination suggests we shouldn’t be content to ascribe the absence of discussions about motherhood in philosophy

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to a lack of imagination among male philosophers. Typically, philosophers love to stretch their imaginative muscles in whatever directions their arguments lead, yet they have balked at reflecting on motherhood even when their own arguments lead directly there. Why have philosophers shown so little imaginative curiosity about women’s experiences, specifically their experiences of maternity? Why is it easier for me to imagine being a bat, a zombie, or a brain in a vat than to imagine what it was like to be my wife over the past several months?

MISREADING LEVINAS I mentioned that I have two reasons for thinking there must be a deeper reason why philosophers have been reluctant to philosophize about motherhood. My second reason is more autobiographic, and to explain it, I must return to one of the conversations with my mother that I mentioned at the start of this chapter. I recently published a book on Emmanuel Levinas, my fi rst book, in the fall of 2008. Soon afterward, I sent a copy to my parents. My parents are not academics, and I did not expect them to read my book. Sending them a copy was the tenure-track professor’s equivalent of bringing home a handmade drawing or an A+ spelling test to hang on the refrigerator. To my surprise, my father read it, and he enjoyed grilling me about obscure French philosophers whenever I called home. I think part of the reason he read it was because he appears in its preface, where I tell a story about him to illustrate a point Levinas makes about ethical responsibility. To my father, the book was something of a brush with celebrity. After a while, it occurred to me that my mother might be feeling hurt because she does not appear in the book. She eventually confessed that she didn’t feel jealous this time, but she reminded me that I had given a paper on Levinas a few years earlier in which I also told a story about my father. In that paper, I talked about my father’s memory of the first time he held me and the transformation that occurred in him at that moment, and I used this memory to assess a point Levinas makes about ethical responsibility. My mother admitted that she felt hurt that my father repeatedly gets cast as a hero figure in my writing, whereas I have never told any stories about her. She felt especially irked by my earlier paper because the transformation in her life that occurred as a result of my birth had been no less substantial; what’s more, she had been pregnant with me for nine months and was the one who had actually given birth to me, which had been a long, painful process, whereas my father had come close to passing out in their Lamaze classes. I had forgotten about this paper. The more I thought about it, the more it worried me, for a few reasons. First, Levinas faulted his own writings for focusing too much on fatherhood. At the end of Totality and Infinity, his fi rst major work, he discusses what he calls “fecundity,” a relation in

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which one apprehends another person as oneself yet not oneself. He claims that there is a kind of triumph over death in such relationships: although it is inevitable that I will die, there is a sense in which I endure in those for whom I have made sacrifices, who in turn endure in those for whom they have made sacrifices. He claims that father-son relationships exemplify this relation: “The fact of seeing the possibilities of the other as your own possibilities, of being able to escape the closure of your identity . . . this is paternity” (Levinas 1998, 70). Levinas later said, however, that he was troubled by how he had depicted gendered roles in his early works, and one fi nds fewer discussions about fecundity and paternity in his later works. Instead, he proposes that maternity, by which he seems to mean the experiences women undergo in pregnancy, exemplifies his concept of responsibility (2000, 75–76). Here we have a philosopher who explicitly criticizes himself for focusing too much on fatherhood and urges his readers to reflect on motherhood. Yet for me, a philosopher who claims to be a Levinas specialist, these warnings never registered, and I repeatedly drew on stories involving my father’s life to make sense of Levinas’s ideas. Worse, I claim to be a feminist. I accept what Mary Devereaux calls the “fact of patriarchy”—that existing society “distributes power, status, and rights to men and men’s interests, to the detriment of women and women’s interests” (2003, 647). As a feminist, my goal is to critique the processes by which men’s interests come to be privileged and to show how they can be masked in ways that make them difficult to recognize. As a philosopher, I am especially concerned to expose how this occurs in philosophy—how existing philosophic theories provide intellectual support for patriarchal patterns of thought. Yet I made the same mistake I criticized Plato for making earlier: that although reflection on motherhood seemed required in my research, I repeatedly turned to my father’s life for illustrative examples. So the questions persist: Why do male philosophers have trouble philosophizing about motherhood? Why do we fi nd it difficult to tell our mothers’ stories? Why doesn’t it occur to us to reflect on motherhood?

PHILOSOPHIZING AND MAKE-BELIEVING I expected to have one answer to this question when I began this chapter. Along the way, though, my perspective became more complex. I sketch in this section what I initially intended to propose, but in the next I will say a few words about how now, a year later, my perspective has changed. First, a few caveats. I want to be careful in what follows not to fall into the philosopher’s trap of offering a reductive answer to a complex question. To be clear: many factors contribute to the tendency among male philosophers to omit women’s perspectives from their theories. My proposals should be understood not as rivals but as complimentary explanations.

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Also, to reiterate, the absence of philosophic reflections on motherhood is mainly due to the fact that until recently, women and their experiences were excluded from the discipline. It is telling that the fi rst substantial philosophic publications on maternity, such as Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking, were only published by women in the past thirty to fi fty years, as the discipline became more accessible to women. Nonetheless, when I began this essay, I hoped that I might learn something about the imaginative resistance male philosophers seem to encounter when they try to reflect on motherhood, using my failure to acknowledge to role of maternity in Levinas’s philosophy as a crucible for reflecting on this issue. 2 I had experienced this resistance fi rsthand in my publications on Levinas. Initially, then, I hoped to gain some insight by clarifying why I had turned to my father’s life to clarify his ideas when Levinas’s own writings, and my own training in feminist philosophy, should have directed me to my mother’s life for examples. This error reveals something interesting about the role imagination plays in philosophy. In earlier work, I criticized Levinas’s account of responsibility as too one-sided inasmuch as he cannot explain how we can have duties to ourselves. Levinas repeatedly claims that ethical responsibility is always responsibility for “the other.” Surely, though, the criticism runs, we have duties to ourselves as well. Levinas offers various replies to this critique, but I argued that none were satisfying and, instead, I asked what it might mean to live the way he describes. What would it mean to give up the idea of duties to oneself? Could one still feel a sense of self-worth while denying one has duties to oneself? To answer this question, I told a story about my father. My father confessed on the day I left for college that he had never loved another person until he held me for the fi rst time. What he seemed to mean by this was that prior to that moment he had been the sole measure by which he gauged whether his life had meaning, so that even in his relationship with my mother the questions he asked himself were: Do I want to be in this relationship? Does it fulfill me? This changed with my birth. There was now a being who depended on him for care, and he, whether he accepted it or not, was one of the primary sources of fulfilling that need. My vulnerability foisted a new measure onto his life—one that gave it a gravity it had lacked by leading him to acknowledge a source of meaningfulness not rooted in his own life projects, hence the possibility, in his words, of loving another person. The details of this argument need not concern us; I mention it only to clarify why I turned to my father’s life in reflecting on Levinas. I turned to it because projecting myself into it gave me a way to envision what it would mean to live out some of Levinas’s ideas. I think I understood the letter of Levinas’s philosophy well enough without this projection. I could rattle off explanations of his concept justice and “the third,” and I could explain how he uses them to address the previous criticism, but a salient appreciation was missing of what it would mean to weave these insights into my everyday life. To do this, I needed to engage in something like a game of make-believe—one in

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which I used stories drawn from my father’s life as props enabling me to undergo life events that were not my own but that I could imaginatively experience as if they were my own. I cannot pretend that the following confession is anything more than anecdotal, but it seems telling that when I imagined my father holding me, I often saw my own face, visualizing myself holding my as yet unborn fi rst child. In telling his stories, I told stories that could have been mine. I planned, then, to offer the following proposal for why male philosophers fi nd it difficult to philosophize about maternity. For better or worse, philosophers often rely on appeals to folk psychology in constructing their theories, and one way we assess these appeals is through imaginative projection. A philosopher like Levinas proposes a thesis about the beliefs and everyday language we use to make sense of our lives, a thesis that leads him to make some recommendation about how to revise our practices. One way we assess his proposal is by imagining putting his recommendations into practice and asking whether we can imagine ourselves inhabiting this world in various concrete situations. The way philosophers rely on imagination suggests one reason male philosophers, who usually exhibit imaginative curiosity, might find it difficult to reflect on motherhood. If we assess philosophic perspectives by imagining their livability in our lives, these imaginings are inevitably skewed in favor of life possibilities that are familiar to us. To determine if Levinas’s ideas could be put into practice, I needed a concrete scenario in which to imaginatively assess them, but it also had to be one in which I could recognize myself, which led me to look to my father’s life rather than my mother’s for examples. It would be understandable, then, that male philosophers would gravitate toward gender-familiar life experiences in developing their theories. Indeed, it seemed to me that this proposal opens up a more charitable interpretation of Plato’s move in the Symposium. Perhaps his likening procreation to creating laws out of dialogue was not symptomatic of some male anxiety at female procreation but was a genuine, although flawed, attempt to reflect on maternity by imaginatively projecting himself into scenarios that, for a male at the time, would have involved some experience of creativity. This explanation for why philosophers have been reluctant to philosophize about motherhood might seem to contradict some of my earlier claims. I argued earlier that we shouldn’t ascribe the absence of discussions about motherhood in philosophy to a lack of curiosity among male philosophers because they so often delight in trying to imagine unfamiliar experiences. Now I seem to be claiming the opposite: they invariably favor reassuringly familiar scenarios when they engage in imaginative projection. So which is it? If I am right that male philosophers have found it challenging to imagine women’s experiences because they are unfamiliar, why haven’t they been put off by seemingly more unfamiliar experiences, such as wondering what it’s like to be a bat, a brain in a vat, and so forth?3 This is a good criticism—one that deserves a more detailed reply than I can give here. I would suggest that my earlier examples may have nonobvious

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gendered aspects to them, and the same imaginative biases that make it difficult for male philosophers to imagine motherhood may contribute to their interest in them. There is a long tradition under patriarchy of celebrating qualities associated with masculinity while disparaging those associated with femininity. This tradition can be seen in philosophy in the tendency to elevate reason over emotion, mind over body, and in ethics, to emphasize autonomy and independence while downplaying caregiving and dependence. One reason why philosophers may have been drawn to the thought experiments I noted earlier is because they offer the exhilaration of trying to imagine the unfamiliar while covertly permitting them to imagine qualities that are comfortingly familiar. Descartes’s famous thought experiment in the opening pages of the Meditations, in which the reader is asked to imagine that everything he experiences is a dream, requires me to flex my imaginative muscles, but it is reassuringly familiar to me as a male because it shores up my sense of myself as primarily a disembodied mind. Looking over the examples I gave earlier, I am struck by how the same point can be made of many of them, such as Nagel’s questions about what it is like to be a bat and a brain in the vat, or the example in which one’s body is replaced without interruption in consciousness, all of which have been used to argue for forms of mind-body dualism. These examples suggest there is a more troublingly sexist dimension to the reluctance among philosophers to philosophize about motherhood. I propose that philosophers often rely on games of imaginative projection that are skewed in favor of familiar life possibilities. However, it follows that these games are prone to co-optation by the more general tendency under patriarchy to affi rm qualities associated with masculinity while relegating those associated with femininity to a secondary status. If I am continually coached by society to identify with being rational and independent and to relegate embodiment and dependence to a lesser status, and if I cannot help but drift toward familiar life experiences in philosophizing, it would follow that I will invariably fi nd myself affi rming these biases in my philosophic musings. Indeed, one could argue that there is a kind of process of mutual reassurance at work here, with philosophy providing rationalizations for biases that are accepted under patriarchy—biases that philosophers in turn rely upon in constructing their philosophic theories. (This mutual reassurance may also explain why the numbers of women in philosophy remain so dismally low to this day.) For my purposes, I would merely point out as well how maternity in many ways epitomizes many of the qualities that are disparaged under patriarchy. Under patriarchy, I am encouraged as a man to identify with qualities such as being independent, disembodied, and self-contained, and we frequently fi nd these qualities being reinforced in the seemingly outrageous thought experiments philosophers propose in their writings. Yet notice how imagining myself as a woman in the specific contexts involved in motherhood requires me to vividly imagine the opposite set of qualities: how imagining

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pregnancy, birth, and nursing requires me to imagine myself as profoundly embodied; how imagining pregnancy challenges my notion of myself as self-contained; and how imagining the caregiving involved in motherhood in general requires me to imagine relationships of dependence that undermine my sense of myself as independent. By contrast, imagining myself to be a brain in a vat is a piece of cake! The conclusion I planned to draw was there is no easy fi x to the imaginative resistance male philosophers face when they try to reflect on motherhood. For if the imaginings I rely on in philosophizing invariably lead me to project myself into scenarios that are familiar to me, I will invariably glom on to more gender-familiar experiences even when I am deliberately trying to understand women’s perspectives. It seemed to me that the best way to address this obstacle was through a gradual dialectic. I might gravitate toward gender-familiar experiences, but I can make some progress through an ongoing give-and-take in which I listen to mothers’ stories about their experiences and try to imagine them while being mindful of my tendency to “recode” them in terms of gender-familiar experiences. To put this idea into practice, I began a series of conversations with my mother in which I tried to involve her in writing this chapter by asking about her experiences during pregnancy: What had it been like to carry me to term? What did she recall of my birth? How did it compare to my father’s recollection? I learned a great deal from these conversations. To give one example, my mother observed that my father’s recollection of becoming a parent, which had resonated so powerfully with me, had an episodic character to it, whereas she had experienced becoming a mother less as a discrete episode and more as a process. My father might speak of “the moment” when he became a father by holding me for the first time, but for my mother becoming a mother was not a moment but an ongoing state of being, a series of subtle changes that began without her even being fully conscious of them while I was still in her womb, with my birth being simply an especially dramatic phase in this process. Moreover, this insight helped me better understand Levinas’s philosophy. In his early writings, he too depicts responsibility as something we uncover in episodic “encounters with the other”—a claim that, critics observed, contradicts other aspects of his philosophy.4 By contrast, in later works, where he claims that maternity exemplifies responsibility, responsibility is not depicted as an episode but as a condition. One is not so much faced with moments when one must choose to accept responsibility for others but, he later claims, one “always already” exists in a state where others depend on one for support, just as, arguably, one retroactively learns that one has already become a mother—that a being already exists that has come to depend on one’s body and mind for sustenance. Initially, then, I hoped to end this chapter with an image of me talking with my mother on the phone, late on a Sunday evening, acquiring nuggets of insight from her. Fortunately, life intervened and forced me to end it with a less sentimental conclusion.

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CONCLUDING REMARKS: EAVESDROPPING ON MOTHERS’ CONVERSATIONS Roughly a month after I fi nished a draft of this chapter, my wife and I learned that she was pregnant. Coincidentally, the same day we confi rmed her pregnancy my sister called to tell us that she was also pregnant. Witnessing two of the most important people in my life become mothers changed my perspective on the claims I had hoped to make in this chapter. I will remember the year my wife was pregnant as a year of many changes. However, one stands out as especially relevant for my claims in this paper, namely, the year that my wife was pregnant was the year my mother and sister stopped calling my cell phone. I take it be a fairly common practice to keep in touch with one’s extended family through semiregular phone calls. Years ago, before cell phones, the practice was to call up the landline of one’s relatives, talk with whoever answered, and have the phone passed to other members of the family. As cell phones became ubiquitous and landlines uncommon, families faced a new puzzle of social etiquette: if one could no longer call an entire family at once, but only a phone belonging to an individual, whose phone should you call when you want to talk with your extended family? The way this puzzle had been handle in my family was that my family would call my phone when they wanted to talk with my wife and I, and her family would call hers when they wanted to talk with us. My phone stopped ringing the year my wife became pregnant. Instead, my mother and sister took to calling my wife’s phone. Moreover, conversations between them seemed to occur on a daily basis. I would mention to my wife that I intended to call my sister to fi nd out about, say, the testing she had undergone for gestational diabetes only to learn that they had spoken about her results earlier that day. Or I would propose that my wife speak with my mother, a neonatal nurse, to get her thoughts on whether we should be concerned about spikes in her blood pressure during her third trimester only to learn that they had discussed this issue at length a few days earlier. Although I had looked forward to becoming a parent for years, my actual experience of it had an element of spectatorship: it often seemed less like an event in my life and more like an event being discussed in a series of conversations between the women in my family, conversations I was permitted to overhear but in which I was not necessarily an interlocutor. Indeed, it became a running joke that the best way to fi nd out about events in my sister’s pregnancy was to talk to my wife, and the best way to fi nd out about my wife’s pregnancy was to call up my mother or sister. Eavesdropping on these conversations was revealing coming on the heels of several months of interviewing my mother about her experience of maternity. It led me to develop a kind of Socratic wisdom. I came to appreciate how little I had learned from our conversations—not due to any failure on my mother’s part, but rather to my own approach and my own social

148 Joshua Shaw limitations. In contrast with the daily exchanges between my wife, mother, and sister, my interviews with my mother seemed forced and overly cerebral. Eventually, then, I came to suspect that something was missing from the explanation I planned to give for why male philosophers fi nd it difficult to reflect on maternity, for it seemed to me that even in my best efforts to reflect on it I had run into obstacles—obstacles I did not appreciate until I noticed the ease with which my mother discussed the same subject with my wife. Thus I felt obligated to write a new conclusion for this chapter, one in which it ended not with an image of me talking with my mother but eavesdropping on conversations between her and my wife. What lesson did I learn from overhearing these conversations? I do not necessarily think I was wrong to attribute the reluctance among male philosophers to reflect on maternity to, among other things, a tendency in philosophy to rely on imaginative projection and to gravitate toward imagining oneself in gender-familiar scenarios. I also still think the solution to this obstacle is to gradually overcome it by talking with mothers and trying to imagine their experiences while being mindful of one’s tendency to distort them by recoding them in terms of gender-familiar experiences. However, I realized after listening to my wife converse so effortlessly about maternity with my mother that there is a social dimension to this dialectic I had overlooked. That is, the opportunities one has to hear women tell stories about motherhood are limited by the social contexts in which such stories get told, and these contexts are gendered inasmuch as men have long been absent from them. When I interviewed my mother, I was trying to invent a conversational space ex nihilo, and it was not surprising that our conversations were so awkward: neither of us had internalized the social norms and codes of discussing such topics in a mixed-gender setting. By contrast, the conversations between my wife and mother had a comfortable quality to them, as if they were not discussing some aspect of motherhood for the fi rst time, as they in fact were, but reiterating a conversation with a long history among mothers and daughters. A different example may help clarify my point. Consider the ethical dilemmas nursing mothers face when trying to decide whether to nurse in public spaces. I take it these dilemmas are not wholly unimaginable to me as a man. They involve, among other things, issues of how to balance one’s personal beliefs about decency with others’ judgments, whether to publicly defy mores one fi nds sexist, how to balance special responsibilities to one’s children against more general responsibilities to other citizens. At the same time, my ability to fully appreciate the challenges mothers face in addressing these dilemmas is lacking because the experience of breastfeeding is so far removed from my day-to-day life. Consider, fi nally, the contexts where opportunities exist for me to refi ne my ability to empathize with nursing mothers by hearing them discuss how they handled these dilemmas. It is telling that it was not until I began to sit in on breastfeeding classes, at my wife’s request, that I began to hear mothers talk about how they had

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negotiated them. These classes, however, were offered through a women’s center, were entirely taught by women, and the students in them were predominantly women. Men weren’t prohibited from entering this space, but the space was made for women. It is not surprising that breastfeeding classes would be offered at a women’s health center or that women would enroll in them. My point is that listening to nursing mothers discuss their experiences was key to helping me appreciate the dilemmas they face, but these conversations were made possible by and occurred within a highly gendered social institution, a clinic organized by women to help other women, and one to which men have not had much access.5 My access to these conversations was highly serendipitous inasmuch as it occurred only because my wife happened to be pregnant, the classes happened to be covered by my health insurance, and my wife happened to encourage me to attend them. It is not enough, then, as I originally intended to claim, to simply advise male philosophers to listen to mothers’ stories and to try to imagine their experiences. What is needed is further reflection on how to make the highly gendered social contexts in which mothers tell their stories more accessible to men and how to encourage men to learn from them.

NOTES 1. I am indebted to a talk by Jo Ellen Jacobs at Indiana University in March 1999 for drawing my attention to this aspect of Plato’s argument in Symposium. 2. I initially hoped to gain insight into this issue by comparing Levinas’s struggle to acknowledge maternity with my own struggle in my publications on him. However, I came to the question whether his writings were helpful for illuminating the latter. I think there is an interesting story to tell about why he shifted to using maternity to illustrate his concept of responsibility, but I suspect that the shift is due to factors internal to his philosophy. I focus in this chapter instead on clarifying why philosophers in general may fi nd it difficult to philosophize about motherhood. See Claire Katz’s Levinas, Judaism, and the Feminine: The Silent Footsteps of Rebecca (2003, 126–39) for an excellent study of his ideas about maternity. 3. I am indebted to the editors of this collection for pointing out this apparent contradiction in my argument. 4. The locus classicus for this critique is Jacques Derrida’s “Violence and Metaphysics” (1978, 79–153). 5. Another example occurs to me as I am complete this chapter. Earlier today I received photographs from my sister’s baby shower. I notice there are no male relatives at the shower. Presumably, they were encouraged to be elsewhere while she opened her gifts. My experience at my wife’s shower, however, was that gift giving often served as a pretext for storytelling: a female relative would give us a gift that she found useful in her pregnancy, and she would recall her experiences while we received it. I also remember, though, that I ruffled feathers in my extended family when I was reluctant to let the men in the family be shipped off to a local casino during the gift-giving portion of the shower. The fact that baby showers are often given by women for other women, with men excluded from them, strikes me as another example (albeit

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WORKS CITED Aristotle. 1962. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Martin Ostwald. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Devereaux, Mary. 2003. “Feminist Aesthetics.” In The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. Jerrold Levinson, 647–66. New York: Oxford University Press. Katz, Claire. 2003. Levinas, Judaism, and the Feminine: The Silent Footsteps of Rebecca. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kierkegaard, Soren. 2006. Fear and Trembling. Ed. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh. Trans. Sylvia Walsh. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kitlay, Eva Feder. 1999. Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equity, and Dependence. New York: Routledge. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998. Ethics and Infi nity. Trans. Richard Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. . 2000. Otherwise than Being. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. . 2001. Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. Ed. Jill Robbins. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Plato. 1951. Symposium. Trans. Walter Hamilton. New York: Penguin. Ruddick, Sara. 1989. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. New York: Ballantine. Trebilcot, Joyce. 1983. Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

10 On Stepmothers as Hybrid Beings and World Travelers Toward a New Model for Care-full Ethics Beckey Sukovaty

INTRODUCTION This project fi nds new inspiration in the contrast between the traditional roles of stepmothers and birth mothers for furthering the development of the theory and practice of feminist care ethics. Stepmothers have been viewed as evil, scheming interlopers who channel what little power they have into oppressing their stepchildren, whereas the romanticized view of birth mothers has been that of self-sacrificially loving beings who live (and die) only through and for the flourishing of their children. Feminist philosopher Sara Ruddick cautions that even today “an idealized figure of the Good Mother casts a long shadow on many actual mothers’ lives. Our days include few if any perfect moments, perfect children perfectly cared for. . . . The idealized Good Mother is accompanied in fear and fantasy by the Bad Mother” (1995, 31). The ostensible moral divide between the Bad Mother and the Good Mother is widest between the traditional roles of despised stepmother a la Cinderella’s stepmother in the fairy tale and the idealized birth mother a la Cinderella’s “real” mother (Brothers Grimm 2010; see also Bernstein 1994). Neither role is a sustainable model for caring parenting, of course, let alone for an ethics of care: children certainly should be protected if a narcissistic evildoer intends them harm, whereas no real human mother can possibly live up to the romanticized traditional ideal. Further, trying to do so can lead to lasting damage for both mothers and children, which Simone de Beauvoir among many others has pointed out (2010, 524–70 passim). “Perhaps no human relations should be thought of as paradigmatic for all others. Relations between mothering persons and children can become oppressive for both, and relations between equals who can enter or not enter into agreements may seem attractive in contrast,” feminist care ethicist Virginia Held cautions. “But no mapping of the social and moral landscape can possibly be satisfactory if it does not adequately take into account and provide appropriate guidance for relations between mothering persons and children” (1993, 72)—including stepmothers, I submit.

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OTHER MODELS FOR CARE-FULL ETHICS NEEDED The many different approaches to the ethics of care share one common fundamental feature, in that all accurately assert that responsible caring or lack thereof is at the core of all ethical issues and dilemmas. Nonetheless, the unsustainable ideal of “natural” motherhood as synonymous with a parenting relationship characterized by self-sacrificial love has been employed as a foundation for feminist care ethics, for example, in Nel Noddings’s early work (see 1984/2003). Granted, such work represents significant progress because serious consideration of mothering of any kind has been virtually absent from ethical theories, as Held has documented (1993, 43, 47; 1998, 96–97; 2006, 62). Other feminist theorists, including Ruddick, have productively advanced an ethics based on mothering as a practice that, although traditionally the work of women (especially birth mothers), should be defi ned by the act of laboring to provide beneficial care for children, rather than by the gender or relational status of the caregiver. Yet because constructive alternative models remain undertheorized, most such work still leans heavily, albeit unintentionally, on societal norms about the ideal mother as a ground for care ethics. Given the socially entrenched fantasies and fears about mothering roles, until we remedy the lack of alternative models, care ethics will by default remain overly reliant on an unrealizable idealization of the role of birth mothers. This in turn arguably has constricted the development and extension of care ethics to what are traditionally considered family or domestic matters. The utter impossibility that real human beings of any gender or relationship to their children (biological or otherwise) could ever come close to fulfilling the traditional ideal of motherhood ought to inspire feminist ethicists to develop other models on which to ground the ethics of care. This task is particularly important because much of the power of an approach to ethics as caring comes from the convergence of moral theory with real, embodied situations and practices. One source for such a model of care-full parenting can be found in the contrast between the traditional roles of wicked, hateful stepmothers and perfectly loving birth mothers, and the further contrast between those traditional roles and the actual ethical responses of their real human counterparts as they engage in the laborious practice of caring for children. That is to say, for a variety of reasons related to individual and social circumstances, many actual birth mothers, adoptive mothers, stepmothers, and other “(m)others,” such as engaged fathers or foster parents or many paid child-care workers alike, are able to lovingly and successfully nurture their children over time; whereas some birth mothers, adoptive mothers, stepmothers, and other “(m)others” are not. (I use the term “(m)other” to refer to any person who regularly cares for a child in any setting that allows for an ongoing relationship; thus it is a term that includes the wide variety of real persons who are deeply engaged in the practice of (m)othering.)1 Moreover, as feminist therapist Thelma Jean Goodrich observes, “in truth, what even

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counts as good mothering is ideological, not innate; prescribed, not natural; culturally specific, not international; tied to the times, not the ages” (2003, 11). Even so, it bears repeating that no human being is always a complete success or always a complete failure at the practice of (m)othering. Rather than the pursuit of perfection, what matters most, as Ruddick reminds us, is that what we do as (m)others is enough to sustain our children and ourselves over time (1995, 67; see also Bettelheim 1988, passim).

STEPMOTHERING AS “DISTRIBUTED MOTHERING” Before addressing in depth how contrasts between the ideal and reality of (m)othering can provide a useful model for the ethics of care, I would like to call attention to another dimension of (m)othering that helps explicate the need for the project I am proposing here. Eva Feder Kittay describes an aspect of the caring labor of nurturing children in Love’s Labor, which she calls “distributed mothering” (1999, 154–60 passim). Although Kittay considers the ethical implications of mothering throughout her work, she does not ground her ethics of care on mothering per se. Primary for Kittay is the inescapable fact of the unequal relationships of dependence that involve each and every human, and thus our necessary human condition of interdependence, as exemplified by our need to rely directly on caregivers throughout much if not all of our lives (caregivers who are often, if not always, women). This helps Kittay to bridge any gap between an ethics based on care and an ethics based on justice as equality, and thus between personal and political actions. Further, and just as important, this helps Kittay to bridge any gap between ethics as abstracted theory and as lived practice. Employing the adage “we are all some mother’s child,” she illustrates how our claims to equality of rights are not qualities or interests that we may possess as individuals. Instead, she points out that we can only make such claims due to the qualified actions of another person in a relationship characterized by interdependence. A person is “the child of a mother only because another person is (or was) someone who mothered her,” and Kittay accordingly reconceptualizes the grounds for equality as “connection-based” rather than “individualbased” (1999, 25, 27–28; see also Held 1998, 104–9 passim). The emphasis on the necessarily interrelational aspect of our shared human dependency is a key insight of the care approach to ethics. Drawing “on a combination of feminist psychoanalytic theory and philosophy,” this insight allows feminist theorists to “posit an ethics of care as an alternative to dominant hegemony. They point out that acts of care, and a caring disposition, are the hallmark of relationality and connection. Accordingly, care acts as an important counter or reverse discourse to individualism and atomism” (Hughes 2002, 73). Indeed, there is a noteworthy and perverse symbiosis between the romanticized ideal of the self-sacrificial Good Mother on the one hand, and assumptions about individualistic societal

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norms such as the nuclear family on the other. A universalized fantasy of the Good Mother who can fulfill her children’s every need is necessary to sustain the likewise fantastical notion of the nuclear family as fully independent adults who, together with their only temporarily dependent children, comprise a self-sufficient unit that can thus be presumed to not need any significant “outside”—community or social—support. For her part, Kittay notes that her attention to dependency and interdependency in the context of care ethics are based in large part on her own lived situation: “My daughter [Sesha] is a lovely young woman who is profoundly dependent and will always be. Her conditions of severe mental retardation and cerebral palsy have meant she can never carry on a life without constant assistance” (1999, xi). Although Kittay considers herself “Sesha’s one mother,” she acknowledges that “Sesha’s mothering has been distributed across many different individuals: her father, various caregivers, and Peggy,” a hired caregiver whose caring relationship with Sesha becomes “as solid as the bonds of motherhood” (1999, 156, 157). Without these many people to (m)other Sesha, Kittay knows she could not provide adequate care for her daughter. Whereas Sesha’s ongoing needs certainly are greater than those of most children due to her disabilities, Kittay’s notion of “distributed mothering” emphasizes a basic truth: the idealized Good Mother by definition is presumed fully able to meet her children’s every need, although doing so requires sacrificing herself, yet in reality caring adequately for any child is beyond the abilities and resources of any actual individual. Caring for Sesha “takes more than a village” in Kittay’s description, but caring for any child takes at least a village—that is, more than just a female-gendered mother as part of a traditional “nuclear” family. At a bare minimum, others including those beyond the nuclear family must provide minimally adequate support to sustain whoever may be doing the primary (m)othering, even when a particular “village” may provide little direct assistance with child care. Kittay coins the term “doulia” (from the “doula,” whose role is specifically to support birth mothers as they gestate and give birth to their children) to describe this real interdependent need of those who do caring work to themselves be supported (1999, 68, 106–10 passim). Although Kittay does not directly address the practice of stepmothering, I submit that stepmothers—along with other (m)others—are a vital part of the broad range of distributed mothering care that is necessary to sustain and nurture all real children. Moreover, the notion of distributed mothering points us toward more realistic models for the ethics of care than those that rely, if only by default, on the fantasy of an idealized Good Mother.

STEPMOTHERING, AMBIGUITY, AND ETHICS From the context of (m)othering as a necessarily distributed or shared practice, I can now return to exploring how the contrasts between the

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traditional maternal ideal and the lived reality of (m)othering can inspire us toward a helpful revisioning of the role of stepmother as a model for care-full ethics. This reconsideration is overdue, as to date the practice of stepmothering has been almost completely overlooked in both feminist and other ethical theorizing. Indeed, Beauvoir is the only one I have found who even touches upon the practice of stepmothering as such in a philosophical context: “There is no such thing as a ‘maternal instinct’ . . . maternal devotion can be experienced in perfect authenticity; but in fact, this is rarely the case,” Beauvoir observes in her chapter on motherhood in The Second Sex. “A cruel aspect of maternity has always been known; but . . . the idea of the ‘bad mother’ has been defused by inventing the cruel stepmother; the father’s second wife who torments the child of the deceased ‘good mother’” (2010, 554, 556–57; see also 192, 267). Taking up and expanding upon Beauvoir’s astute, albeit brief, observations on the ethical implications of the role of stepmothers is long overdue. Feminist philosopher Maria Lugones’s work on “world” traveling and loving perception has proved particularly inspirational for beginning this project of thinking toward useful real models for ethical care, although it is not directly concerned with the practice of stepmothering. Lugones observes that people, such as her own mother, often move back and forth between social milieus, or “worlds,” in which they feel at home—that is, comfortable enough to be playful—and other social milieus where they do not feel at home. Lugones believes that people who experience such movement between worlds have the potential for using those experiences to inform ethical personal and political actions. She describes playfulness as “in part, an openness to being a fool, which is a combination of not worrying about competence, not being self-important, not taking norms as sacred, and fi nding ambiguity and double edges a source of wisdom and delight” (1987, 17). Nonetheless, Lugones makes clear that her use of the term playfulness is not meant to indicate a mere feeling of amusement nor an ability to avoid having to focus attention, nor does it involve play in the sense of “agonistic” competition (1987, 15–16). Rather, Lugones’s focus on playfulness can be taken as analogous to Beauvoir’s key concept of joy, which she explicates in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1976; see also 2010, 753–66 passim). Joy is a requisite sign for Beauvoir of the success of liberatory ethical actions and political practices that promote human flourishing. Conversely, the absence of joy or playfulness is an important marker of situations that involve coercion or oppression. Lugones also emphasizes that although “irresponsible” playfulness can serve as a badge or marker of arrogant privilege, responsible playfulness as she uses the term is an attitude that can help ensure the ethically necessary stance of humble openness on the part of the privileged “world traveler” who can move voluntarily between situations or “worlds.” The feeling of playfulness or its absence also can serve as an indicator of whether a person who is thrown involuntarily into a new or different situation or “world” is

156 Beckey Sukovaty welcome in and belongs to that world. Note that involuntary world travelers do not have to be physically on the move; often, the “world” travels to them whether they wish it to or not, such as when a person of color from the U.S. is likely to encounter prejudice in their hometown whereas a visitor of Anglo-Saxon heritage is likely to be made to feel welcome. If an involuntary world-traveler—or one whose travel has both voluntary and involuntary aspects—feels unplayful, the contrast between feelings of playfulness in some worlds and unplayfulness in others recreates that traveler as a hybrid “ambiguous being” whose “doubled experience” allows them to participate in “trickery and foolery” (Lugones 1987, 13–14).2 The ethical import of this possibility becomes clear when, with Lugones, we realize that the ambiguous world-traveler can “see absurdity,” can “know truths that only the fool can speak and only the trickster can play out without harm” (1987, 14; emphasis added). When responsibly used, this knowledge helps develop the loving perception Lugones fi nds crucial for undertaking ethical and liberatory political actions. Since many stepmothers are both socially marginalized figures and yet concurrently may enjoy positions of some power within their families or communities, stepmothers also are both voluntarily and involuntarily well situated to become the kind of hybrid beings who can develop the loving perception needed to carefully attend to our caring response-abilities. As feminist psychotherapist Anne C. Bernstein observes, “allowing for an ambivalent story enables family members to move beyond begrudging how current realities are discrepant with past [traditional] expectations and to discover new ways to nurture caring and connection” (1999, 426). For example, most stepmothers have a double status in the family as both insider and interloper—and as both proactively selected by her partner whereas most often not chosen by her stepchildren. This double status can both allow and force a stepmother to travel between those dual “worlds” in a way that cultivates the loving perception that her stepchild may not be able to love her back in the same way that children are ideally expected to love their birth mothers. Moreover, romanticized ideal love for one’s birth mother is yet another impossible social burden that needs remedying, in this case one placed upon children.

A BETTER MODEL FOR REAL ETHICAL PRACTICES Beyond consideration of stepmothers as an example of the kinds of hybrid beings who often are in a position to develop a loving perception that can help in nurturing children, stepmothering—unlike the romanticized ideal of the sacrificial birth mother’s role—is worth examining more closely as a real practice that embodies other features that are useful for furthering care-full ethics. Crucial to the ongoing work of developing a robust and enduring ethics of care is the need to continue to bridge any gap between

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an ethics based on caring practices and an ethics based on justice as equality, and likewise between ethics as abstracted theory and ethics as practice that is applicable to our necessarily interdependent human existence. Foremost among these useful features is that the stepmother’s role is free from universalized assumptions about how all birth mothers are capable of and required to express a self-sacrificial love, which in turn is deemed always both necessary and sufficient to fully sustain her children. Indeed, the evil aspect often ascribed to stepmothering centers around the negative presumption that stepmothers are essentially incapable of such universal—and humanly impossible—love. It is worth noting that this negative presumption resides not only in traditional fairy tales, but has been imported into our social discourse as the assumption that stepfamilies are dysfunctional, and most dysfunctional when the stepparent is female. For instance, Bernstein observes that “social science has played its part in promoting the image of stepfamilies as a hostile environment for children,” including “by holding fi rst-married nuclear families as the paradigm against which to judge all others,” although such nuclear families never have existed in any significant numbers, in the U.S., with the possible exception of a brief period after World War II (1999, 416, 418–19). Certainly the practice of stepmothering does entail radically partial and situated acts of caring that are presumed to be, and will prove, insufficient to fully nurture stepchildren. Yet I submit that, rather than being an ethical impairment, upon reexamination this insufficiency is revealed to be at the heart of the importance of the role of stepmother as a positive model for care ethics. Although it is not possible here to examine all of the many aspects of caring necessary for children to flourish vis-à-vis the stepmothering role, I offer as just one example the dimension of children’s varied needs for closeness or distance in their relationships to those who (m)other them. That is, depending on the specific circumstances, stepchildren may thrive best if their stepmother cares from a distance, allowing ample space for the biological father or birth mother to be more closely involved. Conversely, children may thrive best if their stepmother becomes a, or even the, primary parental caregiver. One child may flourish within a closer relationship, whereas another may do best with more space. Moreover, the needs of stepchildren for closeness or distance, as well as the ability of their stepmother to provide the specific kinds of care they need, will vary due to the individual capabilities, predilections, and social circumstances of all those involved and also over time. A young child who flourishes within a very close relationship to one (m)other may do best during adolescence in a closer relationship to a different (m)other, for instance. As hybrid beings in Lugones’s sense of the term, stepmothers are in a unique position that can allow them to develop the loving perception to be aware of and respond to this dimension of their stepchildren’s needs. Of course, this is not to say that any particular stepmother will be willing or able to meet her stepchildren’s needs in the way that is best for them, just as any particular birth mother or other (m)other may not either.

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I want to reiterate that the very presumption that stepmothers will be only partially and imperfectly able to meet their stepchildren’s needs, if at all, is helpful in developing a model for an ethics of care that has real practical import, because that basic presumption is closest to the reality of what any particular (m)other can be expected to be able to provide her children. In a (m)othering role that is free of impossible expectations, stepmothers also can be free to model the flexible response-ability to the care of their stepchildren that those children need from all of their (m)others. This can be just as useful a model of ethically care-full (m)othering practices when a child’s primary caretakers happen to be biologically related as it is when one or more of their (m)others are stepparents (or foster or adoptive parents, or paid caregivers).

EXTENDING THE ETHICS OF CARE The caring role of stepmother as partial and imperfect is much closer to the real situations involving not only caring for children but also any type of caring relationship—and thus arguably any kind of ethical relationship—in that regardless of intention, no one human being can ever be capable of fully providing for the varied and varying needs of another. Extending care-full ethics beyond the specific practices of (m)othering and beyond other contexts, such as care of disabled elderly persons where the fact of dependency is already socially acknowledged, which Sara Ruddick and Eva Kittay among others have worked to do, is a crucial task for feminist ethicists. However, there is much more that remains to be done in this regard, such as in the area of institutional political theory and practice, as Daniel Engster, a political scientist focusing on care ethics, has noted (2004, 121–22). Thus, I would like to very briefly touch upon a key aspect of how the reexamination of the stepmothering role could be applicable to practices other than those directly related to caring for children or others who have been categorized as “dependent” in our society. With any version of an ethics of care that remains overly reliant on the model of the idealized Good Mother, the role of caring by default will fall within or tend to slip back into an individual responsibility, despite the best efforts of feminist ethicists. This in turn inevitably limits how effectively an ethics of care can engage issues such as international relations and human rights that traditionally have been seen as public, political, and worldly—and thus beyond what has traditionally been relegated to a separate sphere of the private, familial, and domestic. However, an ethics of care that relies on alternative models, such as the role of real stepmothers as previously described, will be able to help keep the focus fundamentally and irrevocably on our shared situated and asymmetrical interdependence. This focus is not confi ned to our ethical responsibilities for those who are closest to us, but encompasses our fellow

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human beings in other social and political contexts, other beings, and the environment we share with them.

STEPMOTHERING AND CARE ETHICS: SOME CAVEATS Before I conclude, it also is important to recognize that the traditional social ideal of the romanticized Good Mother in contrast with the traditional figure of the Bad Mother, as illustrated by a stereotypically wicked stepmother, are not only gendered as female but also are based on an assumption of heterosexual relations as the socially accepted norm. As Goodrich points out, “the romance only holds for mothering under male control. In the context of the heterosexual, married narrative, opprobrium attaches to single mothers and lesbian mothers because they are outside this aegis” (2003, 11)—and unmarried or lesbian stepmothers doubly so. These are social ideals, stereotypes and norms that feminist scholars and practitioners long have worked to revise and overcome. As we continue to make slow but inevitable progress in doing so despite the ongoing challenges we face, we will need to continually revise our models for caring ethics. If and when human beings are consistently able to treat each other in ways that afford each and all of us the possibility of feeling joyfully playful throughout our lives, the power to illuminate our ethical and political response-abilities that Lugones has revealed in the contrast between voluntary and involuntary world-traveling will be diminished. I also want to avoid leaving the impression that there are not other distances between ideals of motherhood and real (m)othering practices that are informative for the ethics of care. For example, although birth mothers traditionally have been considered to be “naturally” closest to the fantasized ideal of the Good Mother, the lived reality of birth mothering is worlds away from that ideal. Moreover, I do not mean to minimize the important ethical implications of the unique labor birth mothers do, such as the labor involved with gestating and birthing infant children. To the contrary, any robust and enduring ethics of care necessarily must be based on and encompass a multiplicity of specifically situated—and thus asymmetrically interdependent—human caring practices, including all ways of (m)othering.

CONCLUSION With those caveats in mind, I propose that stepmothers are one of the kinds of hybrid beings whose duality and ambiguity as they practice (m)othering embodies the inescapably asymmetrical interdependence of ethical caring. The practice of stepmothering is a model, although certainly not the only one, that can afford the possibility for real children and real parents—step and

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otherwise—to flourish. It is also, I believe, a model that can be used as part of the ongoing effort to develop a much firmer foundation than the impossible ideal of the Good Mother from which to extend the efficacy of care ethics to where feminists aspire—far beyond the constrained sphere of the personal and private where caring relations have traditionally been confined, into the necessarily interrelated realms of justice and liberatory political action. I would like to conclude with a brief acknowledgment of my stepdaughter, now a young woman, for first inspiring me to think beyond the stereotypes of wicked stepmothers in order to consider the ethical implications of stepmothering as a practice of loving care-full labor. Five years after I became her stepmother, when she was eleven, she made me a card at school for Mother’s Day inscribed with the following poem, which surprised me a bit, because she usually reserved overt expressions of fondness for her birth mother: “Moms are special, / Moms are neat, / Moms give you really nice treats, / But stepmoms are truly something I adore most, / If you weren’t here, I’d be toast.” With these words, she not only was saying something nice, she was also in a small yet important way relinquishing her own part in the Cinderella fairy tale—the role of the heroine who largely through her own resourcefulness survives her stepmother’s abuse to live happily ever after. As this is one of only a very few proactively heroic roles for females in traditional fairy tales, and a role that continues to garner sympathy for stepdaughters in our society, to give it up even for a moment is remarkable. I thank her for having the courage to turn the stereotype of the wicked stepmother on its head in a way that let me experience “finding ambiguity and double edges a source of wisdom and delight.” And I, in turn, hope I have inspired you to help take up this project of moving toward more useful models for care-full ethics.

NOTES 1. Political philosopher Christine Di Stefano may have fi rst coined the term “(m)other,” which she uses to emphasize the aspect of “feminized other” that adheres to those engaged in child-caring activities, which have been traditionally gendered as female; she also has used the term when referring to the figure of mother as “fantasized imago” (1991, xi, 13). 2. For more on Lugones’s notion of hybridity and ambiguity (focusing on the context of culture and race), see her “Purity, Impurity, and Separation” (1994).

WORKS CITED Beauvoir, Simone de. 1976. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Citadel / Kensington. . 2010. The Second Sex. Trans. Constance Borde and Sheila MalovanyChevallier. New York: Alfred de Knapf. Bernstein, Anne C. 1994. “Women in Stepfamilies: The Fairy Godmother, the Wicked Witch, and Cinderella Reconstructed.” In Women in Context: Toward

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a Feminist Reconstruction of Psychotherapy, ed. Marsha Pravder Mirkin, 188– 213. New York: Guilford. . 1999. “Reconstructing the Brothers Grimm: New Tales for Stepfamily Life.” Family Process 38.4 (Winter): 415–29. Bettelheim, Bruno. 1988. “Ideal and Reality.” In A Good Enough Parent: A Book on Child-Rearing, 289–302. New York: Vintage. Brothers Grimm. 2010. “Cinderella.” In Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Available online via the Gutenberg Project. Accessed May 9, 2010. http://www.gutenberg.org/ catalog/world/readfi le?fk_fi les=47554&pageno=44. 44–48. Di Stefano, Christine. 1991. Configurations of Masculinity: A Feminist Perspective on Modern Political Theory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Engster, Daniel. 2004. “Care Ethics and Natural Law Theory: Toward an Institutional Political Theory of Caring.” Journal of Politics 66.1 (February): 113–35. Goodrich, Thelma Jean. 2003. “A Feminist Family Therapist’s Work Is Never Done.” In Feminist Family Therapy: Empowerment in Social Context, ed. Louise B. Silverstein and Thelma Jean Goodrich. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association / Sheridan. Held, Virginia. 1993. “Care and Moral Theory.” Part I in Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics, 9–105. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1998. “Feminist Reconceptualizations in Ethics.” In Philosophy in a Feminist Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions, ed. Janet A. Kourany, 91–115. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. . 2006. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. New York: Oxford University Press. Hughes, Christina. 2002. “Women Are Caring.” In Women’s Contemporary Lives: Within and Beyond the Mirror, 72–93. New York: Routledge. Kittay, Eva Feder. 1999. Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency. New York: Routledge. Lugones, Maria. 1987. “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception.” Hypatia 2.2 (Summer): 3–18. . 1994. “Purity, Impurity, and Separation.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19.2 (Winter): 458–79. Noddings, Nel. 1984/2003. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ruddick, Sara. 1995. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon.

Part III

Maternal Phenomena, Phenomenology, and Aesthetics

11 Creating Life, Giving Birth, and Learning to Die Brooke Schueneman

INTRODUCTION The Socratic, Platonist, and Hellenistic philosophers are especially recognized for their assertion that philosophy is an activity, a spiritual exercise, of learning how to die. Through meditation, study, and discussion these philosophers aimed to pull death to the forefront of thought. Death was not something to be feared, but a tool by means of which a person might live more fully, with greater consciousness. By performing each action with the realization that death is imminent, one has the ability to exist with “lucidity,” as Heidegger put it. Heidegger wrote that we must make a choice: live an authentic existence with a lucid mind or succumb to human diversion and distraction. If we choose distraction, we are stuck in a world separated into individuals. We are cut off, and as result, alone. Learning to die is a practice in changing points of view. It takes the focus away from this, the individual life, and puts it on unity, a cycle of wholeness that is the reality of life and living. The mother, through conception, pregnancy, and giving birth, is a physical embodiment of this cycle of wholeness. The art of living and the art of dying pervade this delicate integration of simultaneous growth and decay. Without philosophical training, a mother can recognize this ever-turning cycle that reaches far beyond her own personhood, as her self-image changes from child to mother and further, to that of grandmother and, fi nally, to one who will and must die. I believe that pregnancy and motherhood can be processes of self-realization. However, they lend themselves to the contemplation of oneself within a greater whole. Here, I illuminate how the mother is in a prime position to embrace this ancient, but relevant, exercise of learning to die.

DEATH AS A SPIRITUAL EXERCISE It is more than obvious that people are dominated by passions, exaggerated fears, and worry. Stoics held that the root of these passions is concern over

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things we cannot control. The most definite and irreversible aspect of life we cannot control is death. Fear of death is the source of all passion, and therefore, all suffering. Epicureans found harm in the fear of death, as well. Wasting our lives on the irrational fear of death keeps us from experiencing the purest form of pleasure, that which thrives on the value of the present moment: simply existing. Socrates, Plato, and the Hellenistics held that philosophy is a training for death and that we must practice learning to die to live more fully. As a means to practice this training for death, each school had its own version of spiritual exercises. These spiritual exercises were meant to bring about new ways of being and seeing, to adjust the inner attitude. Although their ideas about this inner attitude differed considerably—for Stoics it was tension and for Epicureans, relaxation—each school used spiritual exercises to sculpt inner attitudes. They endorsed what Heidegger later referred to as “being-toward-death,” that is to say, “a human being’s relationship to death is, fi rst of all, of the utmost importance for that human being to discover his or her own basic, genuine, or authentic being” (Cohen 2006, 23). These spiritual exercises were comprised of, first, studying arguments about and against the rationality of fearing death; second, meditating on and internalizing these arguments such that they might be applied to everyday life; and, fi nally, the adoption of a universal perspective, “in that we pass beyond the limits of individuality, to recognize ourselves as part of the reason-animated cosmos” (Hadot 2007, 86). Taking training for death as central, the approaches of the Stoics and Epicureans were quite different. Stoics meant to highlight the fundamental concept that there are certain things we can control and certain things we cannot. The only things we can truly control are how our minds are positioned morally: the only evils are moral evils. As death is not something we can control, it is not an evil and, therefore, there is no reason to fear it: “‘Life in itself is neither good nor evil; it is the scene of good or evil, as you make it.’ And, if you have lived a day, you have seen all: one day is equal and like to all other days. There is no other light, no other shade; this very sun, this moon, these very stars, this very order and disposition of things, is the same your ancestors enjoyed, and that shall also entertain your posterity” (Montaigne 2009, 58). The Epicureans, on the other hand, were concerned with pleasure. To fear death was to rob oneself of pleasures contained within each moment of life. The enjoyment of life should be our only concern and, as death is the lack of life, we should not concern ourselves with it. In fact, it is death that gives an infi nite value to each instant (Hadot 2007, 95).

BECOMING MOTHER In her article “Thinking Mothers/Conceiving Birth” (1996), Sara Ruddick makes an important distinction between the “birth-giver” and the mother

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(36). The birth-giver signifies the pregnant woman, the one who will experience the transformation of pregnancy and will bring forth the child. The mother need not be the birth-giver or a woman. The mother is whoever assumes the role of loving, nurturing, and raising the child. Throughout this assessment of the act of creating life I am referring primarily to the birth-giver/mother—the person who both births and cares. I do not mean to devalue in any way the experiences of those mothers who did not actually carry their children or women who birth children they do not mother. Yet, I believe the physical and conceptual transformations that a birth-giver undergoes during pregnancy creates an embodied experience that is not easily, if at all, rivaled by any other experiences. Historically, discussions of motherhood have their basis in experiences of the mother just after the birth of her child. Almost all humans have potential access to these experiences. A point of empathy and identification with the mother is possible from many perspectives. However, in the case of pregnancy, there exists a substantial barrier between the birth-giver and one who has never been or can never be pregnant. This perhaps explains why there is very little research, study, or discussion about the lived experience of creating life. Amy Mullin highlights this point, noting that in our current culture and especially scientific literature, pregnancy is child focused rather than becoming-mother focused: “[Birth] is significant because it is the time when a child emerges, and the arrival of babies is of far greater interest to people than the experiences of women during pregnancy . . . pregnant and birthing women are judged by an ideology of motherhood that represents these events in the women’s lives as only about the potential or newborn child” (Mullin 2005, 107). The experience of pregnancy, of literally creating a life inside oneself, is seen as merely a means to an end as opposed to the significant social, psychological, physical transformation that it truly is for the birth-giver. Neglecting the phenomenology of pregnancy obscures the radical metamorphosis of becoming mother, a period of substantial imagination and self-exploration. The birth-giver becoming-mother confronts several conceptual shifts that hinge upon her changing body, her new responsibilities, and the child who is part of her yet not part of her. Accordingly, I do not wish to focus on the mother so much as the becoming-mother. Just as the spiritual exercise of learning to die might be approached both physically and conceptually, so can the phenomenology of pregnancy. The physical transformation of pregnancy is obvious to the onlooker as well as the pregnant woman. The breasts enlarge, hair becomes fuller, limbs swell, the gait changes, and of course, the belly grows. The psychological and emotional effects of these physical changes, however, are not so obvious to onlookers. Myra Leifer reminds us that “a striking characteristic of pregnancy is that it is the only period in adult life in which major bodily changes occur with startling rapidity and under normal circumstances” (1980, 31). This rapid but normal change does not occur without direct psychological

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correspondences. Leifer draws our attention to several common anxieties associated with the changing body: (1) major preoccupation with weight, which she contributes partially to cultural beauty and sexual standards; (2) hyperawareness of “pregnancy symptoms,” partially attributed to the view of pregnancy as an illness or condition; and (3) a generalized negative feeling toward the body and its appearance to others. Although these anxieties deserve the extensive attention she has given them, I would like to focus on two of the other reactions she notes: becoming an expert on the body and the paradoxical feeling of gaining power while losing control. According to Leifer, “[most] women in our culture grow up basically uninformed about important aspects of female sexuality, such as pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation” (1980, 20). Personally, I fi nd this statement entirely accurate. When I became pregnant with my fi rst child, I had never seen a birth; I had never spent any time with a pregnant woman; I had no interest in reading or learning about pregnancy; I had never even held a baby. I worked my way somewhat blindly through that fi rst pregnancy, and only during my second (which ended in miscarriage) and third pregnancies did I really come to know my body. Leifer discovered that, partially due to a “sense of unreality” about pregnancy, starting in the fi rst trimester, the mother’s pregnant body becomes the center of her attention (1980, 32). Aside from the disappearance of menstruation, the fi rst few weeks of pregnancy can be quite uneventful. Thus the mother is closely attentive to each and every “symptom” and to any felt differences from the prepregnancy body. This attention and fascination continues throughout the stages of pregnancy and is nicely verbalized by Iris Marion Young: Pregnancy roots me to the earth, makes me conscious of the physicality of my body not as an object, but as the material weight that I am in movement. . . . Movement always entails awareness of effort and the feeling of resistance. In pregnancy this fact of existence never leaves me. I am an actor transcending through each moment to further projects, but the solid inertia and demands of my body call me to my limits not as an obstacle to action, by only as a fleshy relation to the earth. As the months proceed, the most ordinary efforts of human existence, such as sitting, bending, and walking, which I formerly took for granted, become apparent as the projects they themselves are. Getting up, for example, increasingly becomes a task that requires my attention. (Young 1990, 165–66) This attentiveness to and awareness of the body inspires confl icting reactions. Young describes this experience as “producing a sense of power, solidity, and validity” (1990, 165–66). Leifer notes in her subjects a heightened anxiety and a sense of losing control. One woman said, “It’s a feeling that I’ve lost control over some parts of my body, and it really is against

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me now. And I feel really conspicuous, like this big belly sticking out is the only part of me people see. And yet, there are times when I’m really proud of it” (Leifer 1980, 35). Yet, these reactions only have the appearance of opposition. In order to be pregnant and give birth, the mother must surrender some of the control of her body she once enjoyed. Compelled to allow her body to grow and change, surrendering becomes empowering. A woman can sometimes, although not always, fi nd new freedom from many of society’s expectations of physical appearance in pregnancy. She is able to escape from the pressures that tell her she must maintain a certain form and simply be as her body and her baby need her to be. As soon as I was visibly and clearly pregnant, I felt, for the first time in my adolescent and adult life, not-guilty. The atmosphere of approval in which I was bathed—even by strangers in the street, it seemed—was like an aura I carried with me, in which doubts, fears, misgivings, met with absolute denial. This is what women have always done. (Young 1990, 167) “This is what women have always done.” Captured in one brief statement, this identification is an illustration of pregnancy’s fundamental conceptual shift. The most marked conceptual shift during my own fi rst pregnancy was the slow transformation of my notion of self as my parents’ child to that of being a parent. I had thought I considered myself a fully autonomous adult, but my pregnancy took me aback as it illuminated my true self-identification as a child, especially my parents’ child. I felt that, in a strong sense, I belonged to them. They powerfully influenced me and even made most of my decisions for me, caring for me fi nancially and emotionally. Pregnancy shattered my “pretending” as an adult, and as I moved closer to giving birth, my transformation was staggering. I recognized the cycle of life and death in a new way, and I came to the disturbing realization that not only would I become this child’s parent but also my parents would be grandparents. The fi nite nature of life was evident and highly disconcerting. As a result, I have never regained the outlook of that immature teenager for whom death was not a reality. Regina Lederman and Karen Weis refer to this as a paradigm shift, a new perspective on the world and one’s place within it. They call it a process of unfolding (2009, 45, 60) and Leifer notes that as pregnancy progresses, so does the birth-giver’s self-identification as a mother. This shift does not have to be a transition from immaturity to maturity as it was for me. Many women report their experiences as paradigm shifts from being self-centered to collective, or just the opposite, from other-centered to selfcentered; from being free to burdened; as lacking to fulfilled; and tellingly, many women viewed their pregnancies as passages to womanhood (Mullin 2005, 30). Returning to Young:

170 Brooke Schueneman Especially if this is her fi rst child she experiences the birth as a transition to a new self that she may both desire and fear. She fears a loss of identity, as though on the other side of the birth she herself became a transformed person, such that she would “never be the same again.” (Young 1990, 168) Two particularly relevant conceptual reactions often manifest themselves during pregnancy. The fi rst is a possible decline in external emotional investment. Although Leifer considers this one of the most common changes in the emotional life of pregnancy, she goes into very little depth on the phenomenon (1980, 43). She explains that the mother withdraws into herself and ceases to concern herself with those miscellaneous activities outside of what she deems her family unit. Leifer is careful to point out that this “turn inward” is not negative or isolating; rather, it is characterized by “a heightened awareness of the self and fetus as a special unit undergoing a unique experience” (1980, 43). The pregnant mother is no longer simply a single entity. Pregnancy is the only period of life when so many aspects of one’s existence are shared with another. The mother no longer acts for herself alone; her decisions have direct relation to the baby inside her. She can no longer operate as an individual, and for many women, the boundaries blur between her and the baby. Young refers to this as the decentering or doubling of the pregnant subject: The pregnant subject . . . is decentered, split, or doubled in several ways. She experiences her body as herself and not herself. Its inner movements belong to another being, yet they are not other, because her body boundaries shift and because her bodily self-location is focused on her trunk in addition to her head. . . . The first movements of the fetus produce this sense of the splitting subject; the fetus’ movements are wholly mine, completely within me, conditioning my experience and space. . . . I have a privileged relation to this other life, not unlike that which I have to my dreams and thoughts, which I can tell someone but which cannot be an object for both of us in the same way. (Young 1990, 160, 163) Finally, as she becomes more deeply engrossed in the process of creating a life, a mother may develop a keen awareness of death. During each of my pregnancies, this awareness and ardent fear of death has been a recurring theme. Pregnancy is a time of intense imagination and vivid dreams. Death can become more of a reality, especially for those women who have deeply internalized their pregnancy experience. Such women often have a striking emotional response to violence and begin to view the world as potentially threatening (Leifer 1980, 49). This fear of death is not only directed toward the self, but very often also toward the partner or other support people in her life and to the nascent life inside her.

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This fear arises from several elements. Lack of control and the rapid physical changes she experiences must heighten her awareness of the fragility of the human body. Surrendering control of the body comes with the humbling realization that truly very little in this life is determined by our decisions. Further, the mother amidst the cycle of creation and life can recognize the coming stages: aging and eventual death. She empathizes with her own parents and sees them as thrust into this cycle, seemingly just because she is becoming mother. This relentless progression toward death, which begins with birth, always reaches its destination. Barbara Blum agrees, writing that “many authors regard pregnancy as a ‘transitional crisis,’ a time in which psychological defenses are loosened, and a time in which unconscious material is apt to emerge” (1980, 154). Few experiences compare to the transitions of pregnancy; those that do include experiencing the death of a loved one or undergoing the process of death oneself. Transitional crises such as these encourage a reshuffl ing of beliefs, ideas, and perspectives on the world and one’s place within it. A person experiencing a transitional crisis may become more aware of her own inner attitudes and become an ideal candidate to alter and consciously shape these attitudes. The spiritual exercises of the ancients were designed to do just this, and the transitional crisis provides a nourishing environment for profound conceptual change, should one decide to make use of it.

BECOMING-MOTHER AS STOIC SAGE Socrates and Plato spoke much of pregnancy and childbirth, but only metaphorically. They conceived of philosophy as a spiritual pregnancy that can give birth to ideas and wisdom. Nietzsche made frequent use of this metaphor. Plato does not completely exclude women or the pregnant woman from those who have the capacity to obtain a spiritual or philosophical pregnancy, yet pregnancy presents a decided disadvantage (Plato 1992). Thus, for the most part, only those who will not become pregnant can hope to become spiritually pregnant. Essentially, even if a woman could become spiritually pregnant, physical pregnancy is not viewed as a forum of philosophical development. Rather it is a tedious phase that must be endured, one that clouds the mind and apparently renders it incapable of reason. Yet Nietzsche went so far as to say that something is wrong with the sexuality of a woman who neglects childbearing and chooses the pursuit of wisdom (Nietzsche 2007, 101). It is interesting that pregnancy should present any sort of challenge to a philosophic pregnancy, especially for Plato and Socrates. After all, they had a highly dualistic conception of the human, so why should a physical “condition” have any negative bearing on the mind? In fact, experience and information from the senses in large part could not be trusted, therefore it makes little sense that a physical pregnancy should hinder the spiritual activities.

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Conversely, the Stoics felt that experiences and challenges for the corporeal body would only serve to expose the mind to a deeper understanding of the world and others, and only experience can lead one to wisdom. In his discussion of the Stoic sage, Lawrence Becker says, “sagehood is a developmental achievement that requires learning to cope successfully with the widest array of endeavors that are practically possible for humans. This requires learning from direct experience everything necessary for the appropriate generalizations and imaginative experience” (Becker 1999, 111). In response to this, Becker raises the question of whether women perhaps are the only true candidates for sagehood: “The open issue is simply whether the significant physiological changes, opportunities, risks, and experience that are unique to women during their reproductive years are both imaginatively inaccessible to men and . . . if men do not have important, uniquely male experience that is inaccessible to women, then our picture of the sage should be the picture of a woman” (1999, 111). After a disappointingly brief discussion, he determines that indeed women have no such privileged access to experiences outside of what a man (or woman incapable of birthgiving) may also experience. However, it appears that his determination has been based entirely on a question of motherhood versus fatherhood. His one and only argument is as follows: If, as even many misogynists suppose, the healthy mother’s bond with her child is especially powerful and complex, and if such experience gives mothers the opportunity to perfect their agency in ways inaccessible to men (for example in making and sustaining complex intimate relationships), then there is such a connection. We do not believe the case for it has yet been made, however, and so we will keep our picture of the sage androgynous. (1999, 111) Of course, motherhood does not prioritize a woman, as the experience of motherhood and of bonding with a child is certainly accessible to any human. What he obviously, and oddly, neglects is the experience of pregnancy and even birth. Pregnancy, as its own transitional crisis, might arguably be largely inaccessible to those who cannot or shall not experience it. I am not so bold as to assert that a man or woman who shall never be pregnant is incapable of imaginative exercises that might simulate the experience of a pregnancy. Further, I concede that other transitional crises might come close to the psychological, intellectual, and emotional transformations possible during pregnancy. However, I am inclined to assert that, although sagehood is surely an unattainable end, a pregnant woman is in an advantaged position through which to mold her inner attitude and, especially, practice the spiritual exercise of learning to die without fear. The Hellenistic schools of philosophy present us with several clear arguments for why death is not to be feared and, further, that it is completely irrational to do so. Lucretius brings our attention to the symmetry of past

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and future. When we consider the past, before we were born, we have no fear or special anxiety about the fact that, at that time, we did not exist. Why then should we fear some future period when we again shall not exist? Just as in the past we had no sensation of discomfort . . . so too, when we will no longer exist following the severing of the soul and body . . . you can take it that nothing at all will be able to affect us and to stir our sensation—not if the earth collapses into sea, and sea into sky. (Long and Sedley 2006, 151) Epicurus says that we must accustom ourselves to the belief that death is of no concern. For the Epicureans, all suffering lies in sensation. Death is the absolute cessation of sensation, thus there can be no suffering once dead. The opponent may declare that suffering lies not in being dead, but in the anticipation of being dead. Countering this, Epicurus states, “For if something causes no distress when present, it is fruitless to be pained by the expectation of it. Therefore that most frightful of evils, death, is nothing to us, seeing that when we exist death is not present, and when death is present we do not exist” (Long and Sedley 2006, 150). It is completely irrational to fear death. Further, Epicurus points out that an infi nite life will not necessarily contain more pleasure than a fi nite one, and no matter how long one might extend his or her life, it does not change that he or she will be dead for an infi nite period. He means here that the important feature is the quality of life’s pleasure, not the quantity. I am reminded of a couple of particularly relevant lines from the movie Stranger than Fiction: HAROLD: I mean, who in their right mind in a choice between pancakes and living chooses pancakes? DR. JULES: Harold, if you pause to think, you’d realize that that answer is inextricably contingent upon the type of life being led . . . and, of course, the quality of the pancakes. Stoics contend that all disturbances in life are just the results of the judgments we make about certain things or events. There is nothing inherently frightful in death; as such, we have only ourselves to blame if we are afraid. Michel de Montaigne suggests that much of our fear arises from the rituals surrounding death: “I believe, in truth, that it is those terrible ceremonies and preparations wherewith we set it out, that more terrify us than the thing itself; a new, quite contrary way of living; the cries of mothers, wives, and children: the visits of astounded and afflicted friends” (2009, 61). Montaigne is an extreme example of living by keeping death at the forefront of all thought. He proposed that to rid ourselves of the fear of death we should “begin to deprive him [death] of the greatest advantage he has over us, let us take a way quite contrary to the common course. Let us disarm him of

174 Brooke Schueneman his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death. Upon all occasions represent him to our imagination in his every shape” (2009, 52). Yet logical arguments such as these have serious limitations. Logically understanding and agreeing with certain concepts does not guarantee fully internalizing them. These arguments seeking to liberate us from the fear of death do not alone suffice, and they are not without their opponents. Many contemporary philosophers feel that one can be harmed by death and that it is quite rational and natural to fear death.7 Ultimately, the rationality of fearing death or whether or not we can be harmed by it makes no real difference. We will die, and just as the Stoics believed, we must choose how to cope with this inevitable reality. We can fear it, deem it harmful and worry over it, or we can use it imaginatively to live our lives more fully. This is the true exercise of learning to die. These logical arguments are meaningful as the preliminary point from which to integrate our daily activities with the principles they offer. Although the ancient spiritual exercises are highly imaginative, they are also intended to be practical. These imaginative exercises based on logical principles are to be lived philosophies and should correspond to and permeate all daily experiences. Infusing practice with imagination is a central exercise for which a mother may have an advantage. Without much effort, and many times unwillingly, a pregnant woman vividly imagines the child in her belly. She imagines her labor and the child emerging. She imagines holding her child and the days, months, and years to follow. She imagines everything that might go wrong, as well as how she wishes things will go. Her imagining the baby and these events can function to alter how she orients herself in the world. Her sensitivity to the pain of others may be heightened, and she may more easily empathize. She may (re)prioritize the elements of her life and become more open to change, growing increasingly able to disregard dispensable and insignificant components of her life. She has already surrendered her body to natural forces outside of her own control; she can now surrender her mind to the universal perspective. If she chooses to, she can adopt the principles contained in these logical arguments and adjust her inner attitude toward this new view of death and, as a result, of life. Within her transitional crisis, her attitudes are much more malleable, and the elements of learning to die are already present should she orient herself to recognize them as such. Her life progresses toward that ultimate end as her body creates new life. Learning to die requires more than accepting the reality of one’s physical death. To truly master this exercise, we must also allow our individuality to die. This can be accomplished by adopting the universal perspective. Those who can step outside of the frivolous trappings of petty human affairs become “excellent contemplators of nature and everything she contains. They examine the earth, the sea, the sky, the heavens, and all their inhabitants; they are

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joined in thought to the sun, the moon, and all the other stars . . . although they are attached to the earth by their bodies, they provide their souls with wings,” says Philo Judaeus (Hadot 2007, 98). He goes on, “and so filled with excellence, accustomed to take no notice of ills of the body or of exterior things . . . it goes without saying that such men, rejoicing in their virtues, make of their whole lives a festival” (Hadot 2007, 98). The poignant and primary advantage that pregnancy has over any other transitional crisis is that a pregnant woman is not required to imagine many of the exercises the ancients prescribe. First, the becoming-mother very much dies to her individuality. She is no longer an individual; the viability of the child dependents entirely on her. Second, as discussed earlier, the mother, as she approaches the birth of her child, directly experiences withdrawal from the concerns of the outside world and is absorbed in a powerful natural process. Finally, and most significant, she does not have to imagine the natural processes that lead us through creation, birth, growth, and death. The mother has become the process; she literally embodies the human cycle. She is creating life and reproducing; she is growing while decaying. Her entire being moves toward life at the same time it moves toward death.

CONCLUSION Ultimately, I must agree with Becker’s androgynous image of a sage, for it is possible for virtually any willing human to embrace and internalize these ancient principles. However, some form of transitional crisis may be required to truly step outside of the egocentric, individualistic attitudes most of us maintain. Indeed, pregnancy in particular is a transitional crisis that provides the ideal forum for the sort of spiritual development learning to die is intended to provide. The pregnant woman undergoes many of the prescribed exercises, whether she wants to or not; but if she chooses to actively internalize and integrate these exercises into her life as a whole, she is in a decidedly advantaged position to truly learn to die. By surrendering the illusion of control, she can gain genuine control of her pregnancy, labor, birth, and most important, her life. By recognizing the process she has become, she is free to identify that fundamental principle that relies upon seeing what depends on our actions and what does not depend on our actions: seek only that which is attainable and avoid only that which is avoidable. Motherhood, as well as fatherhood, has a way of forcing us to get realistic. A mother soon finds that a clean house, quiet time, and a full night’s sleep are all luxuries, and if she has any hope of happiness, these are things that must be enjoyed when they are present but put out of mind when they are not. And this is the higher purpose of learning to die: living in the present. Death is the root of our overwhelming concern for the past and, especially, the future. We worry about what we can do, will do, want to do but will never get to do. Yet the piercing fact of the matter is we do not know

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how much time we have. We waste our lives pining for the past and anticipating or dreading the future. All we truly have exists right now, and the Hellenistic philosophers take great pains to show us this. A mother’s child grows so quickly. It is cliché, but clichés are such for a reason: their obvious truth. It would serve a mother well to use the transitional crisis of pregnancy to prepare herself to die. By training a focus on the present moment she will open herself to do as the Epicureans would have it. She will enjoy pleasure of the highest quality in the brief instants of infi nite value that make up her life with her family and friends. She will be prepared to do as the Stoics instructed by focusing on the things that she can control. She will maintain patience in the face of hardship and the assuredly endless trials she will endure as a mother. Only by fully internalizing this relentless cycle of life and death, this cycle which she has truly become, can she gain freedom from the constant fear of death and illusion of control and possess the only sort of control we humans can hope for: control of our minds. Should the mother master this art of learning to die, of adjusting her inner attitude toward the present moment, she shall not go unchallenged, but she shall be fulfilled. They say that life’s greatest pleasures lie in wanting what you have, and the Epicureans, in particular, would be inclined to agree. If a mother can train herself to live in the present instant, she is in a position to want and appreciate what she has, knowing that each new moment can only be seen as yet another blessing.

NOTES 1. That is, anyone who is emotionally invested or sufficiently sensitive can directly experience or, at least, empathize with meeting her child for the fi rst time. 2. I appreciate the fact that she has made the effort here to emphasize that pregnancy is normal. At the outset of the chapter “Pregnancy,” she highlights two false conceptualizations of which even pregnant women are guilty: fi rst, that pregnancy is an illness, and second, that pregnancy is a brief and unimportant period during which the pregnant woman should continue to act as she normally would. 3. The physical appearance of pregnancy might have the opposite effect on other women who may feel ashamed, less sexualized, or even afraid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Although sagehood might be unattainable, I do believe the pursuit of sagehood is of paramount importance. I do not believe any person can become perfectly wise, but I think there is great virtue and value in trying to become such. 7. See Richard Sorabji’s Time, Creation, and the Continuum (1983), specifi cally chapter 12, section II. Also, the introduction to Simon Critchley’s The Book of Dead Philosophers (2009) offers arguments for a rational fear of death.

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WORKS CITED Becker, Lawrence. 1999. A New Stoicism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Blum, Barbara L. 1980. Psychological Aspects of Pregnancy, Birthing, and Bonding. New York: Human Sciences. Cohen, Richard. 2006. “Levinas: Thinking Least about Death: Contra Heidegger.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 60:21–39. Critchley, Simon. 2009. “Introduction.” The Book of Dead Philosophers. New York: Vintage. Hadot, Pierre. 2007. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Helm, Zach. 2006. Stranger than Fiction. Dir. Marc Forster. Columbia Pictures. Lederman, Regina, and Karen Weis. 2009. Psychosocial Adaptation to Pregnancy: Seven Dimensions of Maternal Role Development. New York: Springer. Leifer, Myra. 1980. Psychological Effects of Motherhood: A Study of First Pregnancy. New York: Praeger. Long, A. A., and D. N. Sedley. 2006. The Hellenistic Philosophers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Montaigne, Michel. 2009. “That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die.” In The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Trans. Charles Cotton, 47–61. Lawrence, KS: Digireads.com. Mullin, Amy. 2005. Reconceiving Pregnancy and Childcare: Ethics, Experience, and Reproductive Labor. New York: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. 2007. Beyond Good and Evil. Sioux Falls, SD: NuVision. Plato. Republic. 1992. Trans. G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Ruddick, Sara. 1996. “Thinking Mothers/Conceiving Birth.” In Representations of Motherhood, ed. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sorabji, Richard. 1983. “Fear of Death and Endless Recurrence: Lucretius: past non-existence is no evil.” Time, Creation, and the Continuum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 176–79. Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Throwing like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

12 The Pregnant Body as a Public Body An Occasion for Community Care, Instrumental Coercion, and a Singular Collectivity Julie Piering

INTRODUCTION The image of the pregnant body is as symbolically powerful as it is publicly recognizable. The fecund silhouette is a familiar part of our cultural imagery and visual vocabulary. The public attention paid to the pregnant body is especially interesting because of what it symbolizes: the private, the family. It gestures backward toward the intimacy that created the body’s prolific shape as well as forward toward the intimacy shared between mother and infant. There is, then, a peculiar and compelling incongruity in the way in which the pregnant body is regarded within the community. It is a body that is immediately and widely distinguishable for what it ideally represents: personal moments, the creation of a family, the sharing of life and lives. The pregnant belly is inviting, nearly irresistible. Strangers test its firmness, comment on how the baby is carried, and guess how far along the pregnancy is. Benignly they wonder about due date, sex, and possible names. More intrusively, they may ask about reproductive history, intention to use pain relief during birth, diet and nutrition, plans to breastfeed or work outside the home once the child arrives. It is hard to imagine another occasion in a person’s life when such personal questions would strike the inquirer as appropriate. Whether pregnant women find this curiosity complimentary, caring, intrusive, or odd, its existence is something on which most women comment. A quick survey of the conversations held by pregnant women reveals the two most commonly asked kinds of questions in this regard are “why do strangers touch my belly?” and “why do strangers think it’s okay to touch my belly?” Inspired by these questions and eager to make sense of them, I reformulate them and ask a related question of significance: How should we think through the public interest in a pregnant body? Might it reveal something about the way in which the community both supports and scrutinizes mothers, women, and perhaps all its members? Finally, in what way is the pregnant body of interest because it is itself a public body, a collectivity? My three questions arise in part from the multiple meanings encountered in the term public. First, stemming from publicus, “public” suggests

The Pregnant Body as a Public Body 179 community, especially something belonging to the community. In keeping with this meaning, there is a sense of unity and kinship surrounding the activity of childbirth, here conceived as an expansion of community. Any member of society, then, is legitimately interested in and concerned for the pregnant woman. Although the immediate familiarity strangers permit themselves with a woman’s body can be disconcerting, in some respects this interest operates as an extension of the familial model and can likewise be comforting. The fi rst section of this chapter takes up this relationship in its positive aspects. Second, “public” stands in opposition to “private,” and thus what is public is “open to general observation.” This might seem like a strange way to think through pregnancy given its links to intimacy and family. Nevertheless, it accurately calls attention to the visibility of the pregnant body, a body that is made increasingly transparent with the use of technologies such as sonograms and through the widespread imagery of the fetus within the womb. In this sense, then, the pregnant body represents less the woman carrying the child than the child itself. The woman is instrumental to the baby and so is properly treated as an instrument. Touching and inquiring about the pregnant body would not be unlike kicking a car’s tires. The second section of this chapter examines the potentially problematic aspects of the community interest in the pregnant body, especially when it leads to a coercive governmentality or a reduction of the woman to a womb. Finally, the pregnant body is itself a kind of community. From initial flutters to well-defined kicks and jabs, the pregnant woman becomes increasingly aware of herself as a collectivity. This is more acutely the case in a multiples pregnancy during which she likely will feel the individuated movements of more than one fetus, but the embodiment of more than one body is central to the experience of pregnancy. The third section of this chapter examines the way in which the pregnant body is a singular collective, itself a public body. Before exploring these aspects of the embodied experience of pregnancy, a caveat is necessary: the model of pregnancy I am using is that of a chosen pregnancy within a technologically advanced community. I do not intend to make sense of pregnancy itself as a universal phenomenon; instead, I seek to investigate the interplay between the pregnant woman and the community as well as the growing collectivity within her. I choose Northern, technologically advanced democracies, such as those in North America, because that is the type of community I find myself within, of which I have some understanding and which I hope to understand better.

THE PREGNANT BODY AND THE EMBRACE OF THE COMMUNITY The typical inquiry into the woman’s body and embodiment, especially from the feminist perspective, is with regard to beauty and its standards. One legitimately wonders whether they encourage objectification and are oppressive, patriarchal, imposed in concert with consumerism, destructive

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to the community of women, and so on. Rarely is the female body explored from the perspective of pregnancy as an embodied and lived phenomena. Pregnancy enters philosophical discussion primarily from the standpoint of ethics, including an interest in medical ethics, legal ethics, and the question of autonomy. Within these discourses pregnancy is important because it is the site of a possible confl ict between the rights of a future person, the fetus, and those of a woman, or because in cases of medical peril one must weigh the risks to and interests of a woman against those of the unborn. The responsibilities a pregnant woman has toward both the fetus and herself have likewise been duly explored. Rarely, however, do philosophers take up the embodied experience of pregnancy; still less often is it considered from the perspective of the relationship between the woman and the community. As a woman’s body becomes obviously pregnant, she begins to experience her relationship with the community differently. Most women anxiously anticipate the moment when they “look pregnant.” The grounds for this desire are diverse. First, we socially value pregnancy. By contrast, being overweight is socially disapproved and considered aberrant to the norms of beauty and health. A common topic of discussion among pregnant women is when they started “to show.” Most often they comment that before a certain week they simply “looked fat.” The transition from a socially unfavorable category to a privileged one and the resulting opinion a woman holds of her body clearly motivates the desire to look pregnant. Second, in the fi rst trimester a woman likely feels the pregnancy, due to the inaptly named “morning sickness” as well as growing breasts and belly, but she does not necessarily match the cultural image of pregnancy. Some women at this stage of pregnancy choose to keep the news to themselves or tell only a select few, tentative in case of miscarriage or loss. The sense of her pregnancy rests with her; it is yet to become publicly visible. Although the pregnancy is palpable to her and guides her decisions, her external appearance does not yet inform those around her. A woman may look forward to the harmony of feeling pregnant with looking pregnant. Finally, the external signs of pregnancy bring with them increased care and attention. The pregnant body becomes an invitation for praise or, as will be explored in the next section, condemnation. A woman who appears to be in a stable economic and familial situation as well as of an appropriate age is congratulated and even gushed over. Strangers commend her and laugh with her about sleepless nights to come, the perils of diaper changes, and the joys of fi rst smiles and giggles. She is made to feel special and cared for by a community that is ready to welcome an exquisite new member whose presence she is making possible. Many women in this situation report a positive experience with pregnancy despite physical discomfort. Women will comment on how much they loved being pregnant not, or not simply, because of how their bodies felt but because of how the community felt about their pregnant bodies: generous and jubilant. Adrienne Rich

The Pregnant Body as a Public Body 181 describes this experience and contrasts it with her experience prior to pregnancy: “As soon as I was visibly and clearly pregnant, I felt, for the fi rst time in my adolescent and adult life, not-guilty. The atmosphere of approval in which I was bathed—even by strangers in the street, it seemed—was like an aura I carried with me, in which doubts, fears, misgivings met with absolute denial” (Rich 1976, 6). This is also a time when a woman might feel less objectified, especially sexually. Young comments that although “pregnancy remains an object of fascination, our own culture harshly separates pregnancy from sexuality. The dominant culture defi nes feminine beauty as slim and shapely” (1984, 52). The continuum between being a sexually active woman and a mother is often bifurcated, and pregnancy can occupy an oddly liberating middle ground. Before becoming pregnant, many women fi nd themselves in the double bind of wanting to be beautiful, desiring those attributes deemed feminine and attractive, although not wanting to suffer the alienation that accompanies sexual objectification. From this perspective, pregnancy presents an embodied way of discovering in oneself a feminine and empowered subjectivity. However, if a woman is not in a culturally privileged position, if she is not white, is economically disadvantaged, is of a lower social status, if she is considered too young or too old, is single or within a same sex relationship, already has a number of children, or participates in any other category that sets her outside the conventional standard of motherto-be, she may have a very different experience of pregnancy. For women who are not in the privileged position described by Rich, their visibility can become vulnerability as the attention of others is accompanied by a critical gaze.

VISIBILITY, VULNERABILITY, AND INSTRUMENTALITY: GOVERNING THE PREGNANT BODY The community attention described earlier is kind and encouraging, even buoyant. Such support, however, depends on the pregnant woman’s correspondence with community standards. The visibility of the pregnant body can be a source of shame, embarrassment, and unwarranted fi nger wagging. A story told me by my hair stylist, let’s call her Joy, is illustrative. While pregnant with her second child Joy took her mother to lunch. She had wanted to treat her mother, who was going through a difficult time, caring for a dying husband and taking custody of a two-year-old grandchild, Joy’s niece. While her mother went in ahead to the restroom, Joy entered the restaurant with the two children, her own three-year-old and her two-year-old niece. She was, by her own account, “really pregnant.” A woman who was leaving as Joy went in wagged her fi nger at the children on Joy’s two sides and said, “Don’t you know what causes that?” Feeling

182 Julie Piering the need to defend herself and the children with her, Joy explained that the little girl was her niece. The ill-mannered stranger became abashed and fumbled through an apology. Joy married and started a family at eighteen. At the time of this incident she was a twenty-one years old and was visibly pregnant with what seemed to be her third child. That is, she fit the category of a too-young mother, part of a perceived epidemic with which society ought to be concerned. A stranger found her pregnancy reprehensible and felt no compunction in literally wagging her fi nger at a young woman “who ought to be ashamed of herself.” Given that the stranger referred to little children as “that,” it is possible that from her perspective Joy was busy filling the world with things she could not possibly care for properly with which the state would likely have to help. In addition to the brute fact of their pregnancy, the behavior of pregnant women receives public scrutiny. There are countless stories of women being lectured, glared at, and otherwise accosted for having a drink, real or assumed, while pregnant. Exploring some of the worries about and reactions to drinking while pregnant in a New York Times piece, Julia Moskin (2006) quotes a bartender: “‘Nothing makes people more uncomfortable than a pregnant woman sitting at the bar,’ said Brianna Walker, a bartender in Los Angeles. ‘The other customers can’t take their eyes off her.’” Some women are made so uncomfortable by the perceived censure of the community as to not want to enter a bar once visibly pregnant, or if persuaded to join nonpregnant friends, to loudly order water or other clearly nonalcoholic beverages. Other stories come to us from women who accumulate belly fat in such a way that they tend to look pregnant when they are not. A member of my extended family, let’s call her Marie, is just such a woman. Marie was with her husband and another couple at the American Beer Festival. While in line, a fellow giving out the beer gave her a disparaging look and asked, “Do you want one for the baby, too?” She took her cup, returned his nasty look, and retorted, “I’m not pregnant; I’m just fat.” These are somewhat innocuous examples of the way in which the pregnant body becomes a site for public judgment. Just as a person who is smoking outside a restaurant or café might be asked, “Don’t you know that smoking kills?” a stranger condemns the objectionable behavior with a question that seems to say “you ought to know better.” The question here is not simply whether the concern from others is warranted. My interest is in the spirit in which this concern is voiced, whether it is truly concern, the kind of atmosphere it creates, and what it tells us about the perception of women. First, behind a certain category of reactions to the pregnant body looms the judgment that women cannot be trusted to protect themselves or their fetuses. It becomes, then, the burden of others to regulate those who cannot govern themselves. Given the well-known studies

The Pregnant Body as a Public Body 183 on fetal alcohol syndrome and the taboos on alcohol consumption that were strengthened by the surgeon general’s 1981 warning, few pregnant women in America drink. Those who do drink typically consume modestly and under the guidance of their doctors. Yet, a common assumption is that women are either too ignorant or too weak willed to do what is best for their bodies and their babies. This is part of a legacy in which historically even a woman’s mental states and desires were thought to have deleterious effects on their fetuses. A woman’s inability to govern her own body, to take care of herself while pregnant, or to take care that she not become pregnant leads to a history of regulatory models. Among the most troubling versions of this found its way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927, when the Court upheld Virginia’s compulsory sterilization law in Buck v. Bell. Virginia, as well as other states such as Michigan, California, Pennsylvania, and Washington, had passed eugenics laws wherein the state could force sterilization on the feebleminded. Individuals who were under the care of the state and who were deemed “socially inadequate” could be sterilized for the welfare of the state. Writing for the majority, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. brusquely summarizes the rationale behind the decision. We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough. (1927) Holmes is referring to the alleged imbecility of Carrie Buck, her mother, and Buck’s daughter, Vivian. Within the prevailing theories of eugenics, three generations of a characteristic demonstrated its pervasiveness. As legal scholars and ethicists return to the case, the injustice is clear. Emma and Carrie Buck were both institutionalized at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded. Carrie was likely institutionalized to cover up her rape at age seventeen by a relative of her foster parents. Vivian’s intelligence was tested at six months old and determined to be “below average.” Although she died at age eight, Vivian’s report cards contradict Holmes’s assessment and reveal that she was a girl of perfectly average intelligence. Buck v. Bell was never overturned, and in the subsequent decades almost sixty thousand forced sterilizations occurred. As scholars have pointed out, the institution of sterilization had more to do with moralism, class, and race than “feeblemindedness” (Lombardo 2008).

184 Julie Piering Second, given how appalling the Buck v. Bell case and its legacy is, it is important to mention straightway that not all public worry about the pregnant body is subsumable under its rubric of the government of women’s bodies. There is certainly a way of supporting a pregnant woman so that she might better make those choices that are in accord with her interests and projects. Barbara Katz Rothman has this in mind when she labels the signs in New York bars and restaurants mean-spirited but the gifts of sparkling apple cider to a pregnant woman kind and loving. “All kinds of things, known and unknown, can harm babies in utero. Mothers must watch themselves. And we all must watch mothers” (2000, 61). This watchfulness might be a friend, family member, or kindly waiter who informs a pregnant woman of research on the perils of alfalfa sprouts in time to prevent her from ordering a certain sandwich. Rather than undermining her subjectivity by treating her as a problematic body, this considerate attention seeks to provide her with important information and support the project, pregnancy, in which she is engaged. Finally, the concern with the pregnant body can actually be a concern for the fetus and it alone. From metonymy to metaphor, many colorful turns of phrase suggest the instrumentality of the pregnant body. The woman is womb, fetal container, and vessel. This notion of woman as womb, supported as it is by the popular images associated with pregnancy, might be so symbolically loud as to drown out the more subtle problems with the instrumental view of the pregnant body. Because there is such concern regarding the fetus, the well-being of the body carrying that fetus can be discounted. Lyerly has carefully detailed the prevailing notions, in medical practice and in the popular advice given to pregnant women, regarding the sacrifi ces women are to make. These range from being so cautious as to not use a CT scan on a woman with appendicitis, the result of which is a miscarriage because of this abundance of caution, to overly abstemious recommendations for diet and activity (Lyerly 2009). In the end, these three ways of governing the pregnant body can be thought through via their intended beneficiary: the pregnant woman herself, the unborn child, or society. Mean-spirited finger wagging and demeaning disapproval by poorly behaved strangers may have the best interest of the child in mind, but it is hard to imagine that it achieves its goal. If, for example, a pregnant woman has a problem with alcohol, a sign posted in a bar, a glare from a disapproving patron, or the refusal to serve her by a waiter or bartender will not keep her from the bottle. Indeed, it will likely alienate her from a community she needs now more desperately than ever. Given the injustice done to Carrie Buck and other victims of compulsory sterilization policies in the U.S., we would do well to think through the real grounds of social evaluations regarding the fitness of potential mothers. While mindful of this, there is a care and watchfulness that can be afforded a pregnant woman that supports her subjectivity, is given in a spirit of generosity, and

The Pregnant Body as a Public Body 185 creates an atmosphere of mutuality. This, I take it, benefits the pregnant woman, her future child, and the community at large.

A CORPOREAL COLLECTIVE The history of philosophy does not reveal much about the topic of pregnancy except metaphorically. Famously, Socrates compares his philosophical art to that of midwifery; Nietzsche employs metaphors of pregnancy and procreation in his discussions of the Dionysian force; and Levinas uses the maternal body in an extended metaphor to make sense of ethical responsibility. Pregnancy is especially prevalent as a dynamic bodily representation of something mental. When one considers that no human being can think, wrestle with the meaning of primordial forces, or become an ethical being without fi rst having been part of a pregnant body, this seems to take something important for granted. It forgets the concrete and difficult work these bodies do and what being such a body entails. When a woman is pregnant, her body becomes a community. She waits, often impatiently, for the fi rst signs of fetal movement. They begin with a nearly imperceptible flutter that is regularly compared to a butterfly’s wings. As the pregnancy progresses she becomes aware of individuated movements including punches, kicks, hiccups, and rolls. The baby may even seem prone to mischief, dancing on her bladder just as she pulls into traffic or reaching up to tickle her ribs as she lays down to rest. In short the baby or babies begin to seem to her as little subjects. This can be exhilarating, alienating, or both at once. Kristeva, Betterton, and Young all describe pregnancy as an experience of alterity, of fi nding oneself other and of fi nding an other in oneself. Kristeva opens her section on the maternal body with a description of this other within the self: Cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on. “It happens, but I’m not there.” “I cannot realize it, but it goes on.” Motherhood’s impossible syllogism. (Kristeva 1980, 237) A pregnant woman’s body becomes foreign to her. Her skin stretches to become an itching band around her belly, her feet and legs swell to unrecognizable proportions, her bladder is so fl attened it can only hold a few tablespoons, and her internal organs are on the move. It occurs in her body, perhaps as part of her design for her life; yet she is not the author of these changes.

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Young speaks of these changes in the terms of a split subjectivity: “Reflection on the experience of pregnancy reveals a body subjectivity that is decentered, myself in the mode of not being myself” (1984, 48). Young points to the experience of pregnancy as a way of contesting the notion of a single, unified subject found in even those existential phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty who stress the embodied nature of subjectivity: “Pregnancy challenges the integration of my body experience by rendering fluid the boundary between what is within, myself, and what is outside, separate. I experience my insides as the space of another, yet my own body” (1984, 49). Alternately, pregnancy may inspire in a woman feelings of amplitude and power. She lies in bed gratefully touching the hand of her baby through her own skin; she is full and adequate. In her poem “Pregnant Perspective,” Faulkner Fox articulates exactly these feelings of power. After referencing the relative insignificance of a single ballot in a full box, she concludes her poem: “You are one man. / I am the country.” The activity of a citizen in the collaborative creation of a body politic is weighed against the work of a pregnant woman in the creation of an embodied life, and the former is diminutive by comparison. The pregnant body as a single, contained, corporeal collective carries with it the perspective of a whole and the experience of being multiple. On a good day it may feel as though one is creating a nation within one’s bodily boundaries.

CONCLUSION Culturally, the way we are meant to treat bodies takes on a strange and discordant duality: one ought to notice bodies but overlook any difference they represent as irrelevant. Within certain strains of philosophy and religion the body is to be the invisible medium of the mind, spirit, or character. One’s body, its coloring, sex, weight, height, and so on, is properly superfluous. Being blind to bodily characteristics is on this view a virtue. We are simultaneously to take pride in our bodies and especially their specificity. Identity politics, for example, demand bodily recognition. Being blind to bodily characteristics is on this view a vice. As members of a community, we are all private individuals and autonomous subjects with public bodies. The community calls on our bodies, and we call on each other to support communal undertakings. This is most evident when united to confront those tasks that require a group, be it filling and stacking sandbags to prevent a river from overflowing its banks or running through a city’s streets to raise money for medical research. The pregnant body is an especially celebrated and scrutinized public body for it is the sine qua non for the continuation of the community. There can be no community without new members, and nothing can remind us of the fragility and beauty of persons and the connections they make quite as well as births.

The Pregnant Body as a Public Body 187 Why, then, are strangers unable to resist the pregnant belly? Hopefully because it is the fi rst physical manifestation of the project of motherhood, an endeavor with which a woman thoughtfully and creatively engages and which is at its best when supported by a caring community. May we be mindful to treat these pregnant bodies and their embodied subjects as ends in themselves deserving of our respect, encouragement, assistance, and perhaps, commiseration. And may we always ask permission before we touch.

NOTES 1. Separating the public from the private, the nation or state from the family, is to a certain extent a false dichotomy. We are all both private and public, members of families within personal relationships as well as constituents of a community. These two aspects of every subject’s experience can support or intrude on each other, a fact that is especially evident during pregnancy. 2. Short of being a pregnant woman talking to other women who are or have been pregnant, one can look at the communities that develop on internet sites such as Baby Center. Accessed October 2, 2011 from http://www. babycenter.com/. 3. The fi rst defi nition in the Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary is “of or belonging to the people, State, or community.” See entry for “public” in A Latin Dictionary (1956), ed. Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 4. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the fi rst defi nition as “Open to general observation, view, or knowledge; existing, performed, or carried out without concealment, so that all may see or hear. Of a person: that acts or performs in public.” Other, more obscure defi nitions carry similar content, including “easily seen, conspicuous, prominent” (http://dictionary.oed.com/). 5. “Chosen” need not convey that the pregnancy was planned. Instead, I only mean to suggest that the pregnancy is one that the woman has accepted and engages in freely. 6. Notable exceptions include Iris Marion Young (1984), “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 9:45–62; and Lucy Bailey (2001), “Gender Shows: First-Time Mothers and Embodied Selves,” Gender and Society 15.1: 100–29. 7. The articles and books engaging this topic are too numerous to list. In addition to well-known arguments by scholars such as Thomson, Marquis, and Singer, a few particularly compelling recent arguments can be found in the following articles: Bertha Alvarez Manninen (2009), “The Metaphysical Foundations of Reproductive Ethics,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 26.2: 190–204; Alex Rajczi (2009), “Abortion, Competing Entitlements, and Parental Responsibility,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 26.4: 379–95; Lawrence Torcello (2009), “A Precautionary Tale: Separating the Infant from the Fetus,” Res Publica: A Journal of Legal and Social Philosophy 15.1: 17–31. 8. For an argument that makes this case without relying on the notion of the fetus’s personhood, see Julian Suvalescu (2007) “Future People, Involuntary Medical Treatment in Pregnancy, and the Duty of Easy Rescue,” Utilitas 19.1: 1–20. Suvalescu offers a compelling if problematic utilitarian perspective on the question.

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9. Such disapproval, of course, has troubling consequences. Bordo’s classic Unbearable Weight better makes the point than any footnote could. See Susan Bordo (1995), Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press). 10. This can, however, be a time of unease as the weight women gain, despite being essential to a healthy pregnancy, moves them away from the standards of “thinness” that are culturally valued. Moreover, as will be discussed in the second section of this chapter, women who fi nd themselves outside of the privileged categories of motherhood because of age, race, sexual orientation, and so on can experience their visibly growing belly with anxiety. 11. Most women who have had this particular experience will assert that the sickness is not limited to morning and the name is overly optimistic at best. 12. An exception is multiple pregnancies, in which women begin to show much earlier than those with single gestations. 13. For a nice study of the way in which technology and the medicalization of pregnancy has led to this tentative experience of pregnancy, see Babrbara Katz Rothman (1993), The Tentative Pregnancy: How Amniocentesis Is Changing the Experience of Motherhood. 14. Women at this stage of pregnancy have already been advised to follow some familiar restrictions, such as limiting intake of fish and caffeine and avoiding alcohol, cigarettes, unpasteurized cheese, and cat litter boxes. They also will be advised to take a prenatal vitamin, drink more water, and consume more calories. 15. There is an important and noteworthy exception: a woman’s condition of pregnancy can be viewed by those she works with and for with consternation, frustration, and even disgust. A pregnant woman might be seen to be on her way to becoming a less productive employee. Further, she might fi nd herself accused, tacitly or explicitly, of having her priorities wrong, seemingly preferring to begin or enlarge her family rather than giving precedence to her profession. 16. There is also an eroticization of pregnant women, although this is less conventional. For example, in 1998 Playboy magazine featured the actress Lisa Rinna while pregnant. 17. This particular tactic has a weakness. It turns out that a pregnant woman matching her companions’ beers or glasses of wine with water must use the bathroom as much as an intoxicated person. She also may lack some of the grace of mobility she had before becoming pregnant. I speak with experience that lurching through the interior of a bar to make it to the bathroom while six months pregnant is profoundly uncomfortable. 18. I use the term “innocuous” because of where this sort of incident falls on a spectrum that has at its other extreme compulsory sterilization. I do not, however, wish to underestimate how alienating and undermining such an experience must have been. I think it is telling that Joy told me this story some seventeen years after it occurred. Clearly, this stranger’s judgment had force. 19. In the case of smoking, we know well its adverse health effects, and in the case of teen pregnancy there is evidence that education and the prospects for a robust future livelihood suffer when a teen becomes pregnant. 20. There is confl icting information regarding the safety of drinking lightly while pregnant. Most studies have been conducted on heavy drinkers. Some doctors will permit their healthy, pregnant patients to drink occasionally and lightly.

The Pregnant Body as a Public Body 189 21. Rosemary Betterton claims that “women in their maternal function, therefore, had to be disciplined to control their desires for the well being of the unborn child—a regulatory model that persists in contemporary injunctions on pregnant women not to smoke, drink, or take drugs” (2006, 83). It is worth mentioning that in the 1980s a series of articles emerged linking maternal stress with male homosexuality. See for example Lee Ellis, William Peckham, M. Ashley Ames, and Donald Burke (1998), “Sexual Orientation of Human Offspring May Be Altered by Severe Maternal Stress during Pregnancy,” Journal of Sex Research 25.1: 152–57. 22. Lombardo thoroughly debunks the argument in the Buck v. Bell decision. For a study of racial sterilization of Native American women, see Jane Lawrence (2000) “The Indian Health Service and the Sterilization of Native American Women,” American Indian Quarterly 24.3: 400–19. 23. The images of Lennart Nilsson, which ran in Life magazine in 1965, have especially helped to shape the public imaginary, making transparent what once was opaque. The image chosen for the cover of the 1990 edition of the corresponding book, A Child is Born, is of a sihouetted pregnant body with an illuminated foetus sucking its thumb. The body in which this fetus rests is shown only as its container; the image is cropped at her neck and below her belly. The standard use of sonograms and the increasing use of 3-D ultrasounds likewise shapes our cultural understanding of the life within a pregnant woman. 24. Aristotle’s mistaken argument that in reproduction the male provides the form and the female, matter is philosophically important but more strictly part of his interest in biology. See Generation of Animals 1, 2 716a6–7; 1, 20 729a11 and following; 2, 1 732a3–5; and 4, 1 765b9–15. 25. The public nature of a woman’s body is heightened during pregnancy, but this ought to be seen on a continuum. Most women are well aware of the public appraisal and consideration of their bodies; they are objects to be viewed, appreciated, judged, manipulated, and even taken.

WORKS CITED Betterton, Rosemary. 2006. “Promising Monsters: Pregnant Bodies, Artistic Subjectivity, and Maternal Imaginations.” Hypatia 21.1: 80–100. Buck v. Bell, 274 U. S. 200 (1927). Fox, Faulkner. 2000. “Pregnant Perspective.” Feminist Studies 26.2: 310. Kristeva, Julia. 1980. “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini.” In Desire in Language. New York: Columbia University Press. Lombardo, Paul. 2008. Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lyerly, Anne Drapkin. 2009. “Risk and the Pregnant Body.” Hastings Center Report 39.6 (November): 34–42. Lyerly, Anne Drapkin, Margaret Olivia Little, and Ruth Faden. 2008. “The Second Wave: Toward Responsible Inclusion of Pregnant Women in Research.” IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 1.2: 5–22. Moskin, Julia. 2006. “The Weighty Responsibility of Drinking for Two.” New York Times. Accessed November 29, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/29/dining/ 29preg.html. Mullin, Amy. 2005. Reconceiving Pregnancy and Childcare: Ethics, Experience, and Reproductive Labor. New York: Oxford University Press. Rich, Adrienne. 1976. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: W. W. Norton.

190 Julie Piering Rothman, Barbara Katz. 1993. The Tentative Pregnancy: How Amniocentesis Is Changing the Experience of Motherhood. New York: W. W. Norton. . 2000. Recreating Motherhood. New York: Rutgers University Press. Trebilcot, Joyce, ed. 1984. Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory. New Jersey: Rowman and Allanheld. Young, Iris Marion. 1984. “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation.” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 9:45–62.

13 Becoming Bovine A Phenomenology of Early Motherhood and Its Practical, Political Consequences Sally Fischer

INTRODUCTION Until my ninth month of pregnancy, I was happily teaching a course on modern philosophy to a class of undergraduates, but within a few days, my pregnant embodiment, to which I had grown accustomed, would be altered significantly. Because much of my own interest in philosophy had been centered on developing an ethics founded upon a phenomenology of embodiment from feminist and ecological perspectives, pregnancy was an amazing experiential source of value to me, and a chance to revisit writers of pregnant embodiment, such as Iris Young and Susan Bordo. Both Young and Bordo offer interesting critiques of the ways that pregnancy highlights just how phenomenologically and ontologically unsound is the position of Descartes, with its separation of mind and body and its definition of the self as a rational, “thinking thing” juxtaposed to a body-object. But contrary to many experiences of pregnancy, in which women have been treated as mere body, as a white, middle-class professional, I was treated neither as incubator nor breeding animal, but rather, I experienced the “pedestal syndrome” (noting that years later I might even want to fashion a prosthetic belly for when I really need a little TLC or to cut in long lines at public restrooms). I did not know, however, that the luxury of being able to think in such a quiet, reflective way about what I was experiencing would soon disappear, at least for a time. I went from discussing contemporary critiques of Kant to feeling as if I qualified for only half of Aristotle’s defi nition of human being as “rational animal.” For a time, I seemed to become simply mammal. The fi rst part of this chapter offers a phenomenological investigation into my experience of “becoming bovine”—what appears to be a common phenomenon for many new mothers, but one for which our culture, our literature, and our workplace policies do not adequately prepare and support us. Whereas Descartes’s introspection in the Second Meditation leads him to conclude that he is essentially a “thinking thing” (“but for how long? For as long as I am thinking”), I realized in my fi rst few days of

192 Sally Fischer motherhood that I am just a mammal (for how long?). Maternal subjectivity, especially in those early weeks, can really bring to light the deep inadequacies of Cartesian ontology and epistemology, and of Lockean ideas of freedom and independence as a model for citizen and worker. MerleauPonty offers a useful critique of the Cartesian cogito that will be fruitful to orient this phenomenology of becoming bovine. Arguing that we fi rst have a practical, affective, and partial hold both on the world and on ourselves, he writes: It is true neither that my existence is in full possession of itself, because it is action or doing, and because action is, by defi nition, the violent transition from what I have to what I aim to have, from what I am, to what I intend to be . . . it is not because I think that I am certain of my existence; on the contrary, the certainty that I enjoy concerning my thoughts stem from their genuine existence. My love, hatred and will are not certain as mere thoughts about loving, hating, and willing: on the contrary the whole certainty of these thoughts is owed to the acts of love, hatred, or will of which I am quite sure because I perform them. (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 382–83) So aside from this thought of being mammal, everything—my tasks, goals, feelings—that seemed to defi ne my “self” seemed to involve little “objective” reflective thought. The day after my son was born, I tried to read the US magazine my sister-in-law bought for me in the hospital as sort of a joke, and it was really taxing. I thought, I used to be a philosopher, but the whole point-counterpoint debate on who was at fault in the catfight between Lindsey Lohan and Jessica Simpson was just really complicated. Existential phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty and contemporary French feminist philosophers such as Luce Irigaray have attempted, as Irigaray says, to “recommence everything,” to go back to experience and rearticulate the categories by which we understand our selves, subject-object divisions, our relations to others and to the world. I would like to suggest that for many new mothers, the categories of experience shift radically, albeit temporarily. Yet this temporary experience can be taken up in a new lived appreciation for the recognition of the shortcoming of the hyperrational views of “disembodied” and gender-biased philosophies (centered on adult, nondisabled male bodies and historically masculine experience). It is important that we consider how these views translate into cultural norms and policies in the workplace. Through a rearticulation of these categories, I want to argue that becoming bovine, despite its initial existential shock, does not entail entering into a state of animality in a pejorative sense. To claim that would mean being caught up in the same false dichotomy as the Cartesian bifurcations of subject/object, mind/ body, human/animal, and so forth. Rather, I borrow Merleau-Ponty’s notion of a “bodily intelligibility”—neither nonaffective rationality nor the

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mechanistic, or “instinctive,” body. Merleau-Ponty writes about a “living thought” (1962, 128) which “understands” a situation in terms of having an internal relation, prereflective intentional threads interwoven with others and the world, rather than thought that consists in subsuming that which is given to us under some rational category. Gestures—for example, those between mother and baby—have an intercorporeal significance because there is inherently an internal relation between my lived body and others. The experience of becoming bovine can open us to an awareness of the richness and depth of our intercorporeal dialogue. In Signs, Merleau-Ponty writes: The theory of the body schema is, implicitly, a theory of perception. We have relearned to feel our body; we have found underneath the objective and detached knowledge of the body that other knowledge which we have of it in virtue of it always being with us and of the fact that we are our body. In the same way we shall need to reawaken our experience of the world through our body. But by thus remaking contact with the body and with the world, we shall also rediscover ourself, since, perceiving as we do with our body, the body is a natural self, and, as it were, the subject of perception. (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 203) Of course, Merleau-Ponty is describing a general notion of lived, embodied perception—not one aimed at questions of motherhood. Yet both pregnancy and early motherhood can be fruitful opportunities to highlight this “reawakening” of “our experience of the world through our body.” Merleau-Ponty’s epistemology, centered on the lived body, grounded in intercorporeal relations, provides the basis for moral and political alternatives to those policies derived from contractarian philosophies founded upon “universal” principles and hyperindividualistic models of subjectivity. Although writers such as Maurice Hamington have successfully used Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology as a basis for a moral alternative in terms of an embodied ethics of care (2008), I would like to use a MerleauPontyan phenomenology of a particular kind of embodiment as a foundation toward a call for real political policy change. We see a striking contrast between the careful phenomenology of human experience that MerleauPonty describes and the models of subjectivity around which many of our workplace laws in the U.S. are developed. Instead, we need to articulate and build policies upon more careful phenomenological philosophies of “otherly abled” bodies in order to provide more equitable workplace laws and to promote healthier families. Here, I focus on the embodied experience common to a significant percentage of the population, namely, the fi rst few months of motherhood. In the second section of this chapter, I argue that the experience of motherhood in those very fi rst months can yield a fruitful phenomenology that can temper views of the body as mechanistic on the one hand (the Cartesian

194 Sally Fischer view), or as reduced to a cultural or discursive construct on the other (misrepresented or exaggerated postmodern view). I use Iris Young’s classic article, “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation” (1995) as a springboard to demonstrate that many of the notions of embodiment that she takes up from Merleau-Ponty’s work apply to maternal embodiment after the baby is born, and that the intercorporeality of the mother-baby relationship can bring to light, in a heightened form, important elements of all human embodiment. In the third section, I begin to bridge the phenomenology of early motherhood to practical concerns. Neither a “universal” rights-based ethics nor a care ethic by itself is sufficient to address the health needs of a new mother and baby in a practical, political sense. As Irigaray would claim, there must be a recognition of real differences—in society, in interpersonal relations, and in law—if women are to be mothers and have full subject status. I argue that a genuine recognition of sexual difference is a necessary condition for an adequate phenomenology of early motherhood and for any family-leave laws that follow. Such a recognition need not fall into the false dichotomy traps of naïve biological essentialism on the one hand or mere “discursive” differences on the other. Finally, in the fourth section, I use the phenomenology of becoming bovine, with its necessary assertion of sexual difference, as a basis for practical, political critique of workplace policies in the U.S. that are inherited from our liberal political tradition. I look specifically at current maternity and family-leave laws, elicit some of the presuppositions behind them, and suggest more adequate laws and approaches, based on both the phenomenological evidence and on a notion of equality as a prescriptive, rather than descriptive notion—one that recognizes the needs of differently abled bodies, such as the bodies of new mothers and their babies.

MATERNAL ATTUNEMENT AS INTERCORPOREAL DIALOGUE Since Iris Young published her wonderful article, “Pregnant Embodiment” in 1984, some changes have occurred, both in the literature and in our culture, regarding the possibility of experiencing pregnancy as “belonging to the woman herself” from the pregnant subject’s viewpoint. Popular books, such as The Girlfriend’s Guide to Pregnancy, offer advice, humor, and anecdotes primarily from the position of the woman-as-subject, rather than as a biological object or an incubator for the fetus. Yet although the cultural understanding of the pregnant woman has changed somewhat (and in different ways in relation to race and class) since the time when Young could accurately claim that “pregnancy does not belong to the woman herself,” (1995, 407) little has changed in the culture and in the laws to recognize the specific embodied needs of new mothers. The underlying assumption is that once the baby is born the woman returns to being a distinct, unified,

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and separate individual again, according to our Western notion of personhood—a notion not very well suited to equitable relations and to healthy families—that developed throughout modernity. Fathers and partners are generally more inclined to be involved in the baby’s care, but in American culture, the idea of it “taking a village” to raise a child is uncommon. The lack of social responsibility assumed by the government, particularly in relation to young children and their working parents, coupled with our highly individualistic and historically gender-biased notion of personhood, may lead to societal and economic expectations being placed upon a new mother that are not consonant with her generic form of embodiment, and which are unhealthy for all—parents and for the baby. On the one hand, there is a clear break between a phenomenology of pregnant embodiment and that of early motherhood. Young emphasizes this when she says that the birth of the child “signals . . . the leaving of this unique body she has lived through, always surprising her a bit in its boundary changes and inner kicks. Especially if this is her fi rst child she experiences the birth as a transition to a new self that she may both desire and fear” (1995, 413). After the birth, there is obviously a big difference in the contiguous self-other relation between mother and baby. If we consider, however, some of the ideas Young borrows from Merleau-Ponty, and which she uses to describe the body-subject of the pregnant woman, we fi nd them to be completely applicable after birth. Both pregnancy and the time after birth represent heightened forms of the kinds of dialogical and decentering intercorporeality that Merleau-Ponty describes so well throughout his work. In Phenomenology of Perception, he describes our embodied, perceptual life as inherently dialogical with the world and with others; as one that undercuts traditional bifurcations of subject and object; and as a lived hermeneutical movement between our reflective and prereflective existence. The aforementioned notions of human existence are all adjoined in his understanding of intersubjectivity as an intercorporeality. At the same time, Merleau-Ponty recognizes that we are always decentered from ourselves—temporally, in language, and even within the blurring of subject and object within our own bodies. Indeed, by his later writings, starting with Signs, he was critical of his very use of such terms as “consciousness,” “subject,” and “object” and instead developed an ontology of the “flesh”—not as the physical flesh of the body, but rather as a kind of elemental matrix, before or beneath ourselves and the world, which open up as aspects of “subjectivity” and “objectivity.” The main point here, however, is that consistently, in both his earlier phenomenology and in his later ontology, he sustained an ongoing critique of the modern (particularly, the Cartesian) notion of the unified and disembodied notion of the subject. In the following text, I elucidate further an understanding of intercorporeality as both dialogical and decentering, and I then weave these concepts into a phenomenology of the experience of early motherhood.

196 Sally Fischer For Merleau-Ponty, we cannot properly speak of egological consciousness. To be human means that even our most reflective, conscious existence is always already grounded in prepersonal, intercorporeal existence. The notion of “dialogue” is central to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, and not only in the context of human relations regarding speech. Our very perceptual existence is founded upon a kind of corporeal dialogue with the world and others. In fact, Merleau-Ponty calls perception itself “a sort of dialogue.” One’s body provides a “certain way of linking up with the phenomenon and communicating with it” (1962, 317–20). Furthermore, this is grounded in the fact that the lived body, according to Merleau-Ponty, is “connatural with the world” and through prereflective behavior is able to “discover a sense in certain aspects of being without having myself endowed them with it through any constituting operation” (1962, 217). Making a clear break from Husserl’s early phenomenology, the term “dialogue” for Merleau-Ponty must not be read to imply only a speaking relation and only at the reflective level. Dialogical relations arise out of our body’s natural expressivity and can take place between body-subjects and between the lived body and the world. After giving birth, the boundaries between self and other, mother and baby might perhaps seem clear again. However, the dialogical relation that develops between the mother’s body and her baby is not based on clearly unified and discrete units of self/other, but rather, on body-subjects who are themselves decentered in language, which for Merleau-Ponty includes gestural language. Our perception of ourselves as well as of others is grounded in an interpersonal, linguistic, and cultural world. Against many thinkers of the tradition, Merleau-Ponty argues that thought is not prior to language. He gives an example of a gestural dialogue in an exchange with a baby, who is capable of certain styles of behavior but not yet capable of reflective thought. He says that the baby “perceives its intentions in its body, and my body with its own, and thereby my own intentions in its own body” (1962, 352). Attentive mothers can become attuned to different cries and coos, to movements and smells, and can respond with a bodily intelligibility that aims at a kind of “global equilibrium.” Becoming bovine entails an acute attentiveness to the relation between one’s body and the baby. Breastfeeding, especially in the beginning, is itself a kind of dialogical art. When I am breastfeeding, I am both a subject with a project, and attending to my body as an object for me and for another; both a discrete person and intertwined in a shared, intercorporeal world, where all our neat terms of “subject” and “object” break down and blur into one another. In her article, Young correctly criticizes many of the existential phenomenologists who “usually assume a distinction between transcendence and immanence as two modes of bodily being. . . . For several of these thinkers, awareness of my body as a weighted material, as physical, occurs only or primarily when my instrumental relation to the world breaks down, in fatigue or illness” (1995, 410). She describes pregnant subjectivity as a potential site

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to simultaneously experience ourselves in our transcendence and have an acute physical and aesthetic awareness of one’s body in its resistance, in its immanence. To be sure, there are moments when I experience my body as body-object, as estrangement or objectification. (What is this new mess around my middle, and why didn’t anyone tell me that after giving birth my stomach muscles would be completely blown and I would not be able to sit up!) However, just as pregnancy “roots me to the earth, makes me conscious of the physicality of my body not as an object, but as the material weight that I am in movement” (Young 1885, 411) the experience of one’s once-again-transformed body-subject during the fi rst weeks of motherhood can provide fecund insights into this blurring of subject and object, of transcendence and immanence, and into a continuous, lived dance of self and other. If not yet developed in the baby, my own ego boundaries are more blurred than I ever remember. Even as I sneak in a shower—an accomplishment in those fi rst couple of weeks—I hear what a friend of mine called the “ghost cries”: are those in my head or from my son? My body that once likened itself, in its adolescent excitement, to a Nietzschean, masculinized adventurer who would climb Mt. Vesuvius, is now so attuned to the needs of another that my internal and external worlds are blurred. Turning toward ontology in Signs, Merleau-Ponty offers a less humanistic notion of subjectivity than he does in his earlier phenomenology. He speaks of the body as a natural reflexivity, which is at the same time sensing and sensible: “If the distinction between subject and object is blurred in my body . . . it is also blurred in the thing, which is the pole of my body’s operation . . . and which is thus woven into the same intentional fabric as my body” (1964, 167). Through the decentering within our own body-subject, our maternal body opens us toward another body—in this case, our baby—and reminds us that even if we are philosophers, citizens, and employees, we are also earthly mammals. Part of the fi rst few months of new motherhood for many women can involve a reinterpretation of our selves. In our interpretive understanding of our own past and goals for the future, we are temporally decentered from our present selves, pulled out of our present, at the same time that we are present to the world. To exist as a human being is to have this open life in which I can be creative, and to be pulled out of my own perspective by the words and the gestures of others because my own perspective (even my lingering Nietzschean fantasies of independence) depends upon a dialogical presence in the world. Thus, within reflective consciousness there remains at the same time a pervasive but ambiguous grounding in our intercorporeality, which is always cultural and historical. The fi rst day home from the hospital I was awkward and anxious about breastfeeding. Until two days previous, babies were largely foreign to me. I was even scoffed at by another expectant mother during the birthing classes because I was holding the plastic baby upside down by one leg during the diaper-changing lesson. Not holding my son upside down, I looked in the

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breastfeeding section of the manual at the picture of the “football hold” and gave it a try. I was not yet fluent in this dialogue and was frustrated and worried, and my son seemed to sense it. Like learning to drive, there is a kind of dialectic between the moments of reflection and getting the bodily feel of it. These two moments or levels of our existence, the reflective and the prereflective, are never wholly separate; it takes time to develop new skills so they become part of our habit-bodies. I imagined Mary Wollstonecraft would laugh if she could see me studying the diagram! In a beautifully written argument from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, bordering on what two centuries later we would call “radical feminism,” she takes Rousseau to task for his naïve assumption of biological essentialism: As for Roussaeu’s remarks . . . that [girls] have naturally, that is from their birth, independent of education, a fondness for dolls, dressing, and talking—the remarks are so puerile, as not to merit serious refutation. . . . For men of the greatest abilities have seldom had sufficient strength to rise above the surrounding atmosphere. (Wollstonecraft 1891, 79–80) Something as natural as breastfeeding is always already bound to cultural, discursive meanings; now one term used to teach it, the “football hold,” is even bound to a popular American sport. But more important, the preferential feeding of breast milk versus formula feeding has had fluctuating cultural meanings (and complexly so in terms of class and race) for the past fi fty years. This interesting topic is beyond the scope of this chapter. Here, I simply note that breastfeeding, like all human activity, is never “extradiscursive”—never natural in the sense that we can speak about it as it is in itself, apart from our often overlapping and complex cultural perspectives.1 In the last section, however, I will discuss an incongruity between the scientifically supported claims regarding the advantages of breastfeeding for one year for both healthy nutrition and healthy bonding, and our family-leave laws that, six weeks after giving birth, force many women back to work and many babies into substandard child-care facilities. Perhaps we shall see that the biological body, if always ambiguously intertwined with culture, can serve as a constraint or limit on how it can be reasonably and ethically interpreted or taken up. Many women say that just about the time they start to become fluent in the lived rhythm of feeding and caring for their babies—the dialogical bonding that all babies need with a primary caregiver in order to flourish— six weeks is up, and it is time to go back to work. Perhaps it is culturally assumed that because by this time their stitches have mostly healed (their object-body is intact again) they can now theoretically be full “subjects” in the workplace. Yet the American understanding of hyperindividualistic subjectivity on which our notion of worker and citizen are founded is not consonant with the subjectivity of most mothers of babies and young children.

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In this form of embodied subjectivity, in becoming bovine, women are not trapped in their instinctual, prediscursively natural female bodies, as Rousseau would have it. But neither do they fit with the model of individualistic, unified subjectivity that, as we saw earlier, emphasizes transcendence and views immanence as estrangement, as a weight, an impediment. Women do creatively try to fit in with the model of subjectivity that is culturally given. They must try to maneuver so they can maintain their subjectivity as it is defi ned in the workplace and still care as best they can for their babies. Both claims—biological essentialism that turns women into instinctual animals in the perjorative sense, and hyperindividualistic, gender-biased notions of what it means to be a subject in the workplace—are phenomenologically unsound, unless we begin with the (unconstitutional) premise that full subject-status in the workplace, with its economic and political privileges, belongs only to nondisabled adult men who are not primary caregivers. As I will argue in the following section, to create laws that are founded upon either a supposedly “neutral,” disembodied, rationalistic notion of the subject, or as is more historically accurate, upon a gender-biased notion of the subject, is to subject women to social and economic discrimination that stems from sexual indifference.

FEELING LIKE A NATURAL (AND CULTURAL) WOMAN Early motherhood is a special form of embodiment, the biological and cultural needs of which must be socially and legally recognized. In this section, I will take a brief look at some of the challenges of recognizing the specific embodied needs of new mothers and of getting those needs written into our laws and inscribed into American culture and interpersonal relations. One difficulty will be to develop ways to talk about specific biological needs of the mother-baby relation that avoid the traps of biological essentialism that have been used to oppress women. One aspect of the existential experience of becoming bovine that I described earlier is the psychological struggle with one’s own sense of maintaining one’s subjectivity out in the world. For women who are beginning as well as for those who are well into their careers before getting pregnant, this time can be a source of economic as well as physical and emotional struggle. Because of our cultural attitudes, economic necessity to get back to full-time work as quickly as possible, and women’s own interests in addition to caregiving, many women may experience their biological givenness as an impediment. This is, to some extent, due to our very understanding of how we have defi ned transcendence as subjects in the world. Like the existential phenomenologists Young critiques, in American culture, we tend to view women’s biological capacities (menstruating, lactation) in their immanence as impediments to be overcome (by medications, formula, breast pumps) rather than also appreciated for their own type of transcendence not bifurcated from their

200 Sally Fischer simultaneous immanence. Mothers of young children, especially those who are breastfeeding, already begin their jobs in a work world whose infrastructure and policies are not designed for their bodies. We can see a useful analogy in Susan Wendell’s understanding of disability as a social construct—not that there is no connection to the biological, but that the very meaning of them as “disabled” requires a society that is structured in such a way that prevents their opportunities to participate (1996, 35). Shannon Sullivan takes up this idea in her book, Living Across and Through Skins: “Social arrangements can make almost any biological condition that was not a disability into one by making that condition relevant to a social institution, and vice versa. . . . Buildings with stairs but no ramps make transporting oneself with one’s arms via a wheelchair, instead of one’s legs via walking, into a disability” (2001, 21). As I shall argue in the following section of this chapter, because we in the U.S. do not have the necessary social and economic support for mothers of babies, for working parents, and for young children, we instead ask that women and children adapt their bodies to the expectations of the employers, and to the infrastructure and policies of a work world not organized around the needs of their bodies. To transform this would require adapting our social responsibility and our workplace policies to the well-being and health of the bodies of women and their young children. Although cultural and political changes are malleable (even if they are difficult to change), our lived, cultural bodies are always intertwined with our biology, and that has a less malleable, limit-setting function in terms of health, well-being, and happiness (which in most ethics are teleological ends, whether implicitly or explicitly). In the previous section I claimed, as Wollstonecraft argued more than two hundred years ago, that maternal embodiment is not an immediate biological given that is raw, natural, and untouched by socialization, history, and by discourse in general. In other words, the body is never outside discursive, cultural forces. In this sense, the distinctions between biology and discursivity are ambiguous and complicated because we can never return to an absolutely “pure” biology, outside its cultural inscription. At the same time, we must be careful because in talking about early motherhood, we do want to talk about embodiment in terms of experience, and those experiences are tied to women’s bodies as including, but not reduced to their biological aspect. 2 It seems to me that Carol Bigwood is correct in her article “Renaturalizing the Body (with the Help of Merleau-Ponty)” when she argues that it is important to assert a noncausal link between gender and the body; otherwise, “we will tend to ignore specific needs for social change in women’s lives due precisely to their being embodied as women” (1991, 56). I agree with Bigwood, in that some poststructuralist philosophers go too far in their denaturalizing the body, insofar as the body seems to become wholly absorbed in its discursive embeddedness and becomes merely a cultural surface inscribed by cultural significations. Although bodies are always already socially inscribed, they are not

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free-floating artifices, but rather, as Merleau-Ponty claims, our bodies are a medium for having a cultural world. In a similar way that I interpret Merleau-Ponty’s account of intercorporeality, Shannon Sullivan has a fi ne reading of what she calls “transactional bodies”: “The boundaries that delimit individual entities are permeable, not fi xed, which means that organisms and their various environments—social, cultural, and political as well as physical—are constituted by their mutual influence and impact on each other” (2001, 1). It will be helpful to keep this intercorporeal notion of “transactional bodies” in mind in the fi nal section of this chapter, when I compare the assumption behind the body-subjectivity of the ideal-worker model in the U.S. to those ideal-worker models of other countries, particularly the Scandinavian countries. For now, I want to note that Sullivan disagrees with aspects of Bigwood’s claims, namely, what she sees as Bigwood’s emphasizing “bodily lived experience by conceiving of bodies as atomistically sealed off from the cultural world” (2001, 8).3 Sullivan accuses Bigwood of hanging on, unnecessarily, to some form of extradiscursive body, instead of understanding embodiment as transactional, in which culture and biological are semiblended as “in a stew,” rather than two separate or discrete elements tossed together, as in a salad. Sullivan uses her “stew” metaphor to explain transactional bodies wherein “culture does not just affect bodies, but bodies also affect culture” (2001, 3). Part of the issue at stake for my purposes here is that political resistance means that we must recognize the materiality of mother’s bodies as setting limiting conditions. I agree with Sullivan that we do not need an extra-discursive notion of the body, one “sealed off from culture such that, at least on some level or in some respect, they remain untouched by culture” (2001, 2). On the other hand, I am wary of falling into talking about embodiment in a way that melts materiality away into various discursive forces, in other words, a view that overemphasizes discursive, cultural construction of bodies at the expense of ignoring concrete embodied experience that is ambiguously bound up with culture and with biology.4 Like the previous example of disability, we do not want to reduce anyone to a biological condition in the sense of a body-object, one of immanence or where one’s body is viewed primarily as an impediment.5 However, if we do not clearly articulate all of the lived, physical and biological differences and requirements in order to participate as full subjects—body-subjects on their own terms, not in comparison with the nondisabled adult male—then how will we be able to more deeply transform our culture? At the same time, there must be an openness on the part of the majority of society to listen to the voices and needs of others who do not fit the typical model of the bodysubject. One of the criticisms of our cultural infrastructure for disabled persons is that we make some accommodations as best we can without really altering the models around which things like architecture, transportation, product placement in stores, entertainment, and technologies such as computer games are organized. For example, we might build a wheelchair ramp

202 Sally Fischer to a building, but there might not be any public transportation accessible to get handicapped persons to that building in the fi rst place; or perhaps handicapped persons can access the store, but the merchandise is almost impossible to access. Drawing this analogy (albeit somewhat loose), my main concern regarding the embodiment of early motherhood is that the bodily needs of women and their babies are not currently the basis for our family-leave and other workplace policies. Instead, the real differences and requirements of their bodies have been erased, subsumed, or taken up as best we can without really altering the goals and infrastructure of a capitalist, patriarchal work-world. Toward a recognition of sexual difference that reduces women neither to the biological nor to the cultural/discursive, I fi nd Luce Irigaray’s writing to be a wonderfully fecund source. I will not be able to address her critique of the sexual indifference of the discourses of the West in great depth here, but instead will only be able to present a brief overview of her critique as it applies generally to philosophy and to law regarding maternal subjects. In her book I Love to You, she writes: “If the other is not defi ned in his or her actual reality, there is only an other me, not real others” (1996, 61). Irigaray’s critique of philosophical discourse—a discourse that has shaped the way we think, the categories and concepts that we use not only in philosophy, but in other knowledges as well, such as law, biology, psychology, and so on—centers around exposing the implicit (and sometimes explicit) logic of the hierarchical binary structure of gender-biased concepts in the West. The “subject” or “subjectivity” in the Western tradition (with the exception of a handful of thinkers such as Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Marcel), as we saw in the fi rst section, has been generally defi ned as a rational subject and juxtaposed with the body-object; a subject who can transcend his body as an impediment. “Subjectivity” has been ordered around male morphology and masculine parameters, yet it has been caged as “neutral.” Thus there has been no place for subject as woman, since this “neutral” subjectivity is already represented and structured as that which is not female/ feminine. The very thing that Irigaray is trying to expose is that women have never had a symbolic order of their own, that is, as women, rather than as the other to what is “proper”: “To demand a right to subjectivity and to freedom for women without defi ning the objective6 rights of the female gender seems an illusory solution belonging to the historical hierarchy between the sexes, and could even subject women to the authority of empty statements promulgated in an egological blindness confused with the collective good. And need I reiterate in this respect that being numerous is not the same as being democratic?” (1996, 5). In other words, women have not been represented in culture, philosophy, and language as subjectivities with a generic identity in positive terms that is tied to feminine experience and to the morphology of their sex. The connection between subjectivity, embodiment, culture, history, and language complicates the aims of feminist thinkers like Irigaray who want

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a notion of the sexed subject. Her aim is not to essentialize “woman,” but rather to show that discourses of philosophy, science, law, medicine, and so on have never been neutral, but rather have been centered round male morphology and male/masculine experience. In asserting sexual difference, she is not reducing “woman” to female morphology as a biological being in an extradiscursive sense. Any creation of sexed subjectivity would always already be discursive and diachronic—thus, asserting sexual difference would be an ongoing creative, cultural enterprise.7 Her interest, furthermore, is not in fl ipping the hierarchy upside down, but to move or stretch thought/discourse toward a new discursive logic, a new epistemological and ontological order, through her deconstruction of the categories of the tradition and through her own creative visions for a logos tied to a female morphology: the hitherto unspoken “underside” of the tradition. As Elizabeth Grosz claims, “as a discipline, philosophy has surreptitiously excluded femininity, and ultimately women, from its practices through its usually implicit coding of femininity with the unreason associated with the body” (1994, 4). The categories common to philosophical discourse have connected women and femininity with the body and unreason, and therefore excluded women and femininity from its proper role. Women and femininity, in a sense, have been the “underside” to what has been deemed the proper avenue of thought, which has primarily been represented as disembodied. This “disembodied” thought has itself generally been considered as that which is either properly male/masculine and/ or properly human. In the latter case, the notion of “properly human” has already implicitly been predicated on models that juxtapose reason and mind with unreason and body, and these models still carry with them the implicit connection of female/femininity to unreason and to the body in its immanence. The sex/gender coding of the general concepts surrounding subjectivity are intertwined historically with the notion of the ideal worker in the public sphere. In the following section, we shall see that in countries such as the U.S., which have very clear bifurcations of the public and the private in terms of viewing family work and caregiving almost solely as a function of the private sphere, the deconstruction/reconstruction of the masculine/male model of the ideal worker is particularly difficult to accomplish because that role largely excludes the possibility that intercorporeality as caregiving is a normal, everyday part of embodied subjectivity. Thus, the sexual indifference implicit in important concepts in the West, such as what constitutes the citizen, the rational subject, the ideal worker and the workplace of the public realm, and so on, is not simply empirical in that men have written most of the texts of history, written most of the laws, and that these discourses are written around historical male/masculine embodied experience. That is true, of course, but also it is the case that men and women are and have been thrown into a tradition, the very discursive structure of which has made it quite difficult to even think “outside” the conceptual framework, that is indifferent to genuine recognition

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of otherness in terms of sexual difference. The connection of the body to empirical history and culture is easy to see: today, for example, the very infrastructure of the business world (and perhaps the public realm in general) is structured around the historically male experience, that is, the one not concerned with pregnant embodiment, the one who is still not generally the primary caregiver, and so on. The aims, albeit important, of early liberal feminists to grant women permission and “rights” to enter the public realm as equals is to ask them to participate in a realm frequently not suited to their sex, and to speak in a language that does not grant subject-status to their sex. That is, they must attempt to enter into what Irigaray calls a “fraternal economy” where historically women have largely been commodities (objects) of exchange (in marriage laws, for example) between male subjects. As Irigaray says, simply, “language and its values reflect the social order and vice versa” (1996, 66). The very concept of “rights” in Western discourse is tied to the tradition of subjectivity written along conceptually masculine lines, in terms of notions of individualistic identity and of property. “Women’s social inferiority is reinforced and complicated by the fact that woman does not have access to language, except through recourse to ‘masculine’ systems of representation which disappropriate her from her relation to herself and to other women” (Irigaray 1985, 85). What Irigaray thinks that we have to challenge, what we have to disrupt, then, includes both our discourse and the way we live our lives, socially and existentially.

PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY FOR CARING BODIES: MATERNALIST AND EQUAL-PARENTING POLICIES In the fi rst section of this chapter I presented a Merleau-Pontian phenomenology of early motherhood that may highlight important aspects of dialogical and decentered human embodiment, grounded in our intercorporeality. The experience I describe as “becoming bovine” represents a heightened form of this intercorporeality, and it presents a critique and an alternative to the highly individualistic, unified, rationalist Cartesian model of the subject. In the second section, I argued that although all human body-subjects are a mixture of the biological and the cultural/discursive, neither of these aspects should be understood as sealed off from or subsumed by the other. Furthermore, there might be occasions when it is ethically necessary to recognize and to assert aspects of female-sexed embodiment in a way that is not understood simply within a masculine model (even if that model is caged as “neutral” or “equal”). In this fi nal section, I will connect intercorporeality to caregiving as inherently a part of all healthy human existence, even if it historically and culturally (and biologically through pregnancy and nursing) primarily is still the role of women. I will argue that the model in the U.S., which holds very little public responsibility for programs that

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support the caregiving functions of families, coupled with a model of the ideal worker that is based on historically masculine experience and primarily on a male body, is harmful to parents and to their children. Relatively recent policies like the Family and Medical Leave Act may be a step in the right direction, but they fail to give women especially the support they need for caregiving roles that are specific to their cultural experience and, in some cases, to their biological bodies. Finally, I argue that two types of federally mandated policies are needed simultaneously: First, stronger “equal-treatment” policies are needed to promote coparenting, and thus support gender reform in both work life and in family life through policies of (ideally, paid) leave for caregivers. Second, maternalist policies that address an aspect of sexed rights of the mother that cannot be addressed through “equal-treatment” policies are required to support needs specific to her embodiment. I shall begin by considering the current parental-leave laws, the implicit assumptions behind them, and their consequences. Current federal law for maternity and parental leave includes the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) and the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). The PDA is applicable in those states that offer disability insurance, and generally to employers in those states who have over fi fteen employees. The benefits differ from state to state, but many states offer partial pay, usually around half of the employee’s salary, capped, for some period of time. The PDA does not provide special insurance, but is only supposed to guarantee that pregnant women cannot be discriminated against if they choose to take disability leave for physical complications with pregnancy or for birth and recovery. The paid period depends upon the state and the employer and can be two to six weeks for normal vaginal delivery and up to eight weeks for caesarean birth. Employees qualifying for the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act may take up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave. Although this leave is open to all caregivers, including both parents, adoptive parents, and caregivers of a seriously ill child or parent, this act applies only to employers with more than fi fty employees; because of the many small businesses, only about 60% of workers qualify. The types of family leave in the U.S., which are usually unpaid and that women must piece together, seem to be loaded with social presuppositions about the body-subject of the desired employee. Norms and policies organizing the workplace in the U.S. are predicated on a model of the hyperindividualistic subject and politically on the “free and independent” nondisabled male body that is the model for social contract theorists, for example, the theory espoused in Locke’s Second Treatise. Thus, the model of the ideal-worker (meaning outside family and household work) has been written around historically masculine experience that makes few caregiving demands and allows for a clear separation of work and family duties along gender lines. The ideal worker is not only predicated upon gendered assumptions that exclude it from substantial caregiving, but was founded upon male bodies who would not get pregnant or nurse. If we intend to

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genuinely open the public realm to body-subjects who do not fit this norm, however, then we will have to take the needs of otherly abled body-subjects into account more substantially in order to rid the ideal worker model of its sex/gender biases. The U.S. differs significantly from other developed and developing nations in regard to the very limited responsibility that its government assumes for social programs. Despite recent health reforms, it remains the only industrialized nation without some form of national insurance. In addition, it significantly lags behind other nations in its commitment to child and family programs, such as paid parental leave and a nationally funded system of quality day-care facilities. Head Start and the Family and Medical Leave Act were significant gains for a nation that places economic responsibility for caregiving almost solely on the family or individual, and secondarily on employers; particularly on large employers, who may voluntarily offer additional employment-based benefits, especially in strong economic times with low unemployment. Employment-based family-leave benefits vary greatly, some of them partially paid, some unpaid, and are aimed at reducing work-family confl ict and improving worker productivity. Compared with other industrialized nations, the U.S. does not see responsibility for work-family confl ict as being part of the public domain. In fact, the U.S. is only one of two United Nations members (193 in total) that did not ratify the International Convention of the Rights of the Child, which “asserts the obligation of the state to assist parents, especially working parents, with the upbringing and development of children” (Neal and Hammer 2007, 219). Somalia was the other nation that failed to ratify. What do our family leave policies presume about the body-subejcts of women? Providing only federally mandated unpaid leave (for which not all women qualify) suggests, perhaps, that it is assumed that women are either extremely fi nancially well off as a class, or that they are under the economic support of a husband or partner. These assumptions are not only empirically false but also create a fusion of class, race, and sex/gender bias. For women who either have to or choose to return to work very soon, and even for those lucky enough to have some paid leave through their state’s or their employer’s disability insurance, our policies rely on a kind of “Pop-Tart” theory; much like our national and corporate nutritional assumptions until recently held that whole foods can reasonably be replaced (and subsidized) by processed foods like toaster pastries that contain “7 essential vitamins and minerals,” we deem it healthy and acceptable that the intercorporeal roles parents, and mothers in terms of breastfeeding, play in caring for their babies can be replaced by formula and overcrowded day-care centers, which most women and families will have a difficult time affording. I am not arguing that we should penalize parents for choosing to use formula and send their six-week-old infants to day-care any more than I would outlaw Pop-Tarts. The reality is that it is not a choice, but a necessity for many

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parents. However, what the U.S. chooses to publicly and economically subsidize or not subsidize will have clear social outcomes. What kind of restructuring of maternity and parental leave laws in the U.S. would both support the unique needs of new mothers—thereby recognizing sexual difference by writing into legal discourse rights that are connected to their female embodiment—and promote gender transformation in caregiver and in ideal-worker roles so that women and men are not economically, legally, and socially coerced into their traditional gender roles? Along these lines, we fi nd divergent strategies advocated by maternalists and equal-parenting advocates. In her book Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do about It, Joan Williams summarizes the central criticism around which “difference feminists” often critique liberal or “sameness feminism” for what they see as its fundamental problem, namely, that the “liberal or sameness feminists’ goal is to allow women to assimilate into institutions designed around masculine norms” (2000, 219). Feminists like MacKinnon and Irigaray argue that traditional liberal feminism, although initially valuable, will never deeply transform society if it only “helps women who can follow the life patterns traditional to men” (Williams 2000, 219). This strategy does not promote equitability for women as women, and according to Irigaray, liberal feminism alone would not open up a vision and a language of what that would even mean. However, Williams argues that a review of the work of many women classified as liberal, equality (and unfairly, as “sameness”) feminists, such as Ruth Bader Ginsberg, shows that they are indeed “committed to deconstructing masculine norms.” She argues that Ginsberg’s “proposals, although tentative, assumed that true equality for women would require restructuring so that child rearing burdens are distributed more evenly among parents, their employers, and the tax-paying public” (Williams 2000, 219). Williams argues that Ginsberg correctly avoided rights and entitlements for caregivers based on sex, which could end up sanctioning women into traditional roles and penalizing men and women for nontraditional gender performance. Instead, Ginsberg preferred to use “functional categories” such as “caregiver,” regardless of sex. To be sure, the promotion of entitlements based on functional categories that serve to support primary caregivers who are working outside the home indeed helps women, who still fulfi ll 80% of primary caregiver functions in the family. Williams thus aims to show that liberal, or equality feminism, is almost never “sameness” feminism based on assimilation into male norms. Building a case for increased parental leave and caregiver support that relies on such “functional categories” may be a sound starting point for deconstructing/reconstructing the former ideal-worker model based on masculine norms and on the nondisabled male body with few family responsibilities. On the one hand, a father or partner of either sex who serves as a primary caregiver should be given the time and the fi nancial

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support to engage in the kind of care and bonding that is so essential to the baby’s health and to creating strong family bonds. On the other hand, as we know from the experience of “becoming bovine” in cases where the mother wants to breastfeed, a functional category of the rights of caregivers (who are not necessarily women) might still need to be based on the real needs of the woman’s body. In other words, liberal feminists who want to avoid notions of equality that do not address the historical and cultural situations of women and that do not address problem of the ideal-worker model being historically masculine are right to turn to functional categories, but they still have one more issue: how do we defi ne the norm of the function of caregiving? To be sure, this is a wide category with many cultural and historical possibilities. As humans, however, we are biological as well as cultural beings, and although with the invention of formula and breast pumps the role or function of primary caregiver can be met by men and domestic partners (and earlier by wet nurses), the bodies of mothers that include the biological as part of their embodied being require a different functional role. Thus, again, we are not really outside of “difference feminism” when we inquire about defining those functional roles. To rely on what I called the “Pop-Tart theory” of infant care is inexpensive to tax-payers because it requires little public and governmental responsibility and only minor adjustments to the masculine ideal-worker model; much like a wheelchair ramp can be a relatively inexpensive add-on, but may not really change the lived reality for many disabled persons if other infrastructural changes are not also made. The American Medical Association recommends a full year of breastfeeding: to write equality into the laws in a way that would not penalize mothers who choose to breastfeed would mean that the parentalleave laws would consider the body-subjects of mothers to be the basis for the law and would mandate employers to provide time and private spaces for pumping if women return to work while still nursing. Finding the divide among feminists in terms of simplistic sameness/difference descriptions to be inaccurate, Williams sees the divide, instead, among advocates for caregiving entitlements to be between the maternalists and the equal-parenting advocates. Adoptive parents and fathers may qualify for policies such as the FMLA, so these clearly are meant to support equal parenting. Some maternalists in the U.S., however, claim that federally mandated paid maternity leave (at a portion of the employee’s regular pay) for birth and recovery should be a priority. This offers “unequal treatment” based on sex, but it narrows the pool of persons to be funded, making it more likely (although still ideal) to gain support in a nation that bears almost no responsibility for national public support for caregiving functions. Williams argues that maternal-leave laws focused on biological women “seek to empower women within domesticity” and contrasts this with “those who seek gender flux” (2000, 231). If maternity leave were offered solely, without the option of parental leave, which includes the option of paternity leave, then Williams would be correct. But

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restructuring the model of the ideal worker means advocating gender flux by changing both our idea of primary caregivers (to include more men in this role) on the family side and, moreover, by allowing the necessary support for mothers to excel on the work side. Prioritizing a federally mandated paid maternity leave (unlike disability insurance, which differs by state and by employer) as well as parental leave is only discriminatory if we hold the model of the ideal worker as the one who cannot get pregnant and give birth. Williams is right to criticize the use of “special-treatment/ equal-treatment” language that fruitlessly stirs up old gender wars (2000, 231). However, including maternalist policies along with equal-parenting policies both reconstructs gender roles and recognizes the specific needs of women’s bodies. The time of early motherhood is a time of healing, recovery, and transformation, which for the mother is inseparable from the intercorporeal bonding experience—a central part of “becoming bovine.” If mothers are not also allowed additional time for their bodies to heal and for their own restructuring as body-subjects learning the dialogical art of caring for their babies, then they are penalized for their embodiment. One of the phenomenological claims we saw in the fi rst section was that caregiving and bonding take time to develop—and the extra exhaustion, hormonal changes, and physical recovery add an additional burden onto the transformed body-subject of the mother. I write this at a time when in the U.S., members of the quickly growing “Tea Party” movement waive slogans decrying our recent minor healthcare reforms to be akin to both the National Socialism of the Nazis and to the socialist policies of the former Soviet Union. I realize that legal policy changes in the U.S. like the ones I suggest are unlikely to happen anytime in the near future. I think it is useful, nevertheless, to glance at parental and maternal leave policies in a few European Union member nations— ones that have been serving their populations reasonably well for years. To narrow the scope, I will compare the maternalist policies in France to the policies in Sweden and Finland, which place more weight on equal parenting. France offers an integrated system of family policies, including tuitionfree preschools, which are attended by 95% of the population between the ages three and five, with parents paying only a quarter of the day-care center costs for children under three. For the fi rst and second child, paid maternity leave is offered at a rate of 84% of the average daily wage for sixteen weeks, and increases to twenty-six weeks for additional children. There is also paid paternity leave for two weeks during the pregnancy or after birth or adoption. Additional unpaid leave is available for both parents with children younger than three and may be combined with parttime employment, which is common for mothers of young children. These policies, although generous, differ from the more equal-parenting focused policies that we fi nd in the Scandinavian countries. In Finland, every child younger than seven has the right to attend a government-provided daycare facility. Parents of children younger than three may take unpaid leave

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but receive a home-care allowance during the period of their leave, and about half of all child-care expenses are covered by various programs. Sweden presents a striking example of how supportive policies for parents can significantly create gender transformation in work life and family life. In the 1960s, Sweden created progressive paid parental-leave policies and “as a result, the fact that the majority of people combine work with caring responsibilities is taken for granted in the Swedish context” (den Dulk 2005, 177). The Swedish government offers 18 months of paid parental leave at 80% of salary. When it was found, originally, that the vast majority of the leave was taken solely by the mother, it set aside one month of paid leave reserved solely for the father, to encourage paternal bonding and care-giving. Furthermore, childcare is subsidized with parents paying about 13% of the costs, and there is additional paid leave to care for a child who is ill, up to 60 days per year, at 80% of salary.8 It is interesting to note that although the paid leave in France offers strong and generous support for mothers, it may do less to truly transform gender roles because of the relatively shorter leave allowed for fathers. Sweden, on the other hand, cages its policies in terms of equal parenting, but the length (up to seventeen months) of paid leave allows time and economic support for the needs of the mother, thus allowing her embodied experience to be incorporated into ideal-worker status, in addition to promoting gender transformation on the family side and the work side for both men and women. Sweden’s generous family-leave policy seems to accommodate the needs of early maternal embodiment, and although it is not caged in terms of sexed rights and thereby not explicitly symbolizing a model of female embodiment into legal discourse, it nevertheless accomplishes some of the same goals. I am torn about whether there is a need for explicit sexed rights in cases where the law and the culture does not seem to prohibit the creation of a female embodiment on its own terms (or at least with much greater room to do so). The way that the equal-parenting laws are written in Sweden does not seem to fall prey to the dangers of a so-called “neutral” discourse that, as Irigaray argues, is really organized around male morphology and masculine experience. Conversely, in the U.S., women are forced to comply with models that are strongly individualistic, traditionally masculine, and that seem to place capital over the basic health of families. In this case, while not currently part of our national ideology, perhaps some sort of sexed rights, caged as a paid maternal leave policy, are needed in addition to our familyleave policy, which is very weak by international standards. The happiness and well-being of parents and children requires intercorporeal bonding and care, initiated when children are infants, to help the child develop over time into a caring adult. In his article “Resources for a Feminist Ethics of Care in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of the Body,” Maurice Hamington writes about how “a synchronicity is developed between bodies that spend a great deal of time with one another” (2008, 210). Discussing human perceptual experience using Merleau-Ponty’s

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appropriation of the gestalt, foreground-background model, Hamington states: “The foreground perceptual focus of a parent and child may be on a bedtime story being read but the background interaction of bodies hugging one another tacitly communicates love, tenderness, and security” (2008, 211). He quotes Gail Weiss, who says, “to raise a child . . . is not a matter of ‘shaping the mind’ but rather, arises out of an embodied exchange” (1999, 160). Although Hamington nicely elicits an ethics of care from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the lived body, I am unconvinced of the need for such a distinct separation of an ethics of care from a liberal ethic represented in law. Hamington takes the traditional path of care ethicists, following Gilligan and other feminist care ethicists who, despite their divergent methodologies, “share a concern for connection and particularity over universality and abstraction” (italics mine; Hamington 2008, 206). Focusing on either framework of ethics at the expense of the other will not create comprehensive (and slow-moving) change. I am not claiming that a nation can legislate caring into law! But laws that provide the time and support for families to care for each other, and mothers not to be marginalized, not only promote greater “abstract” changes in the conception of the ideal worker, but also open up a space for familial connection and contextbased care. Women and men as caregivers need social support as well as legal support because this time of intensive intercorporeal bonding is foundational for a healthy community; it highlights something about all human existence, about all embodied subjects. Thus, as Merleau-Ponty argues in Humanism and Terror: A society is not the temple of value-idols that figure on the fronts of its monuments or in its constitutional scrolls. . . . To understand and judge a society, one has to penetrate its basic structure to the human bond upon which it is built; this undoubtedly depends upon legal relations, but also upon forms of labor, ways of loving, living, and dying. (Merleau-Ponty 1969, xiv) Merleau-Ponty doesn’t wish to deny individual subjectivity, but as embodied subjects, we are always beings in a social depth: “Our relationship to the social . . . is deeper than any express perception” (1962, 362).

CONCLUSION Thus, as we have seen, our individual embodied subjectivity is always bound up with an intercorporeality from our very fi rst moments, and this extends to the general social realm into which we are born. As Irigaray claims in I Love to You, “the individual cultivation of sexed subjectivity is destroyed by divine commandments, existing marriage laws, . . . an unjust

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division of dignity and labor between the genders, and to a loss of identity in laws and cultural mechanisms abstracted from natural and generic reality” (1996, 13–14). No wonder so many women, especially those who have already been in the workforce for some time, have a diffi cult time negotiating the terrain of “becoming bovine” as maternal subjects in the social world, the workplace, and its discourse, which marginalizes her status as subject both in her family role and when she returns to work. The experience of early motherhood can be a challenging and transformational time for many women, and a call for change in legal policies ought not be divorced from a change in our cultural understanding of ourselves as “bodies built around the possibility of caring” (Hamington 2008, 211)—an experience exemplified by “becoming bovine.”

NOTES 1. Usually, “discourse” and “language” as I use them are interchangeable; however, I often give discourse a wider scope to include any kind of symbolic representation (which is never without its “unconscious” underpinnings), so that term can also refer more generally to what is cultural. 2. This term, “woman,” for me is quite open. I assume a transgender person who has adopted an infant and who is a primary caregiver could have some experience of “becoming bovine” as that term is not simply tied to breastfeeding, to a transformed body due to the birthing, and so on. However, these kind of embodied experiences do highlight typical phenomenological truths for most mothers. In both cases, however, the woman would have similar culturally gendered inscription. 3. I do not think Bigwood is guilty of “sealing off the body” in her reading. True, she does not offer the kind “transactional” account that is closer to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the ambiguous relation of the biological and the cultural—and what I think is more phenomenologically sound—but nevertheless, I think Bigwood and Sullivan share similar and important concerns about certain poststructuralists ignoring or subsuming the concrete aspects of the body in favor of emphasizing its discursivity. 4. Sullivan reads Judith Butler, for example, as doing this very thing, namely, omitting “the concrete experiences of lived bodies” (Sullivan 2001, 61). 5. There are times during pregnancy, however, when one’s body can primarily take on this role. I offer one such example to highlight the importance of “renaturalizing” the body in the phenomenological experience of becoming bovine. The day before I gave birth to my son, I had my fi rst genuine drug-induced hallucinatory experience. I had not slept in more than three days because I had being having full contractions every four to ten minutes for almost four days, without my cervix dialating. On the fourth day I begged my doctor to induce me because of the sleep deprivation, but she thought it best to wait and gave me a sleep aid, Ambien. Apparently, Ambien can be hallucinogenic to some portion of the population, and I am one of those persons. My husband claims that for hours I was lying on the bedroom floor holding my belly saying that something was wrong and that I wanted my mother. He claims that I had no idea I was pregnant, but I said I was “pushing out shapes and straw bales” (the meaning of which

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neither of us could figure out later). My husband and I can look back on this now and laugh, but the additional exhaustion from not having slept for almost five days before giving birth was biologically based, and it deeply influenced those fi rst few weeks after the birth. Women who have caesarean births or have other medical conditions will also have different experiences of “becoming bovine” based on their biological conditions. Obviously, the medical decision to give someone a sleep aid or a caesarean section is culturally bound, but nevertheless, we cannot ignore the biological aspect without discounting the experience. 6. Because Irigaray is dialoging with the texts of Hegel, here she is referring to the term “objective” as meaning realized in the world, not in an ahistorical sense. 7. The creative aspect of Irigaray’s task centers around envisioning the beginnings of this new symbolic order. Through the use of metonymy, she fi nds a way to represent the female/feminine in a manner that links discursive logic with sexed embodiment and that can serve as a starting point for the construction of new myths and fi ctions, of a new female imaginary, which could perhaps assist in the birth of a new social order. Asserting sexual difference, she thinks, is a necessary strategy if we are going to suppose that we can have a sexual relation; that is, an intersubjectivity that arises out of two sexed subjects, which asserts a place for the woman subject to speak as a woman. Her metonymy of “the two lips” serves as a way to disrupt the phallo-logocentric categories of Western thought in terms of a blurring of the dichotomies of subject/object, inside/outside, active/passive, unity/plurality, and so on. Already we can anticipate similarities with Merleau-Ponty’s two leaves/lips of his ontological concept of flesh as the soil of sensing and sensible. By the use of metonymy, that is, of describing a larger concept by means of a specifi c aspect of it, here by an embodied aspect of it, Irigaray links a new discursive and ontological order to the female body. She describes how the bodily experience of women resists the rigid oppositional categories. The mechanics of bodily fluids, the sexual reproductive experience of the body have a kind of “excess factor” that cannot be bounded, categorized. We need not take the concept of the “two lips” as a complete and fi nal defi nition of a woman’s identity or ontology; Irigaray is asserting the connection between discourse and embodiment, but does not think that connection is ahistorical or static. Embodiment and discursive concepts are historical. If we recall the Pythagorean table that bifurcates the “good” (unity) from the “bad” (limitlessness or plurality), we can see that part of Irigaray’s strategy is not only to deconstruct the phallo-logocentrism of the philosophical tradition but, as a fi rst step to the thinking of a new symbolic order, to assert that feminine underside of discourse: “to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it” (1985, 76). The metaphor of fluidity asserts that difference that had been rendered invisible, and at the same time, takes it up in history, opens it up for a fresh meaning in order to begin to think it within a new economy. Through the use of metonymy, then, Irigaray fi nds a way to represent the female/feminine that explicitly links discursive logic with sexed embodiment and at the same time disrupts the categories of the tradition. Irigaray sees the need for a more genuine intersubjectivity on the one hand, but also for a respect for the irreversibility of the other, that is, that the sexed other ought not/cannot be reduced to the Same. In I Love to You, she desires a movement in history by which we can arrive at a reciprocity of sexed subjects that respects this irreversibility of the one with the other because of

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an irreducibility of one to the other. The goal of sexual difference is not complete reversibility. 8. The statistics in the preceding paragraph are from Neal and Hammer (2007, 52–53).

WORKS CITED Bigwood, Carol. 1991. “Renaturalizing the Body (with the Help of MerleauPonty).” Hypatia 6.3. den Dulk, Laura. 2005. “Workplace Work-Family Arrangements: A Study and Explanatory Framework of Differences Between Organizational Provisions in Different Welfare States.” In Work and Family: An International Research Perspective, ed. Steven A. Y. Poelmans. Danvers, MA: Psychology Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hamington, Maurice. 2008. “Resources for a Feminist Ethics of Care in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of the Body.” In Intertwinings: Interdisciplinary Encounters with Merleau-Ponty, ed. Gail Weiss. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. . 1996. I Love to You. Trans. Alison Martin. New York: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge. . 1964. Signs. Trans. Richard McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. . 1969. Humanism and Terror. Trans. John O’Neill. Boston: Beacon. Neal, Margaret, and Leslie Hammer. 2007. Working Couples Caring for Children and Aging Parents. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Sullivan, Shannon. 2001. Living Across and Through Skins. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wendell, Susan. 1996. The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Refl ections on Disability. New York: Routledge. Weiss, Gail. 1999. Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality. New York: Routledge. Williams, Joan. 2000. Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do about It. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1891. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. London: T. Fisher Urwin. Young, Iris Marion. 1995. “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation.” In Feminism and Philosophy: Essential Readings in Theory, Reinterpretation, and Application, ed. Nancy Tuana and Rosemary Tong. Boulder, CO: Westview.

14 The Aesthetics of Childbirth Peg Brand and Paula Granger

INTRODUCTION All human life on the planet is born of woman. . . . In the division of labor according to gender, the makers and sayers of culture, the namers, have been the sons of the mothers. There is much to suggest that the male mind has always been haunted by the force of the idea of dependence on a woman for life itself, the son’s constant effort to assimilate, compensate for, or deny the fact that he is “of woman born.” (Rich 1986, 11) Images abound of women throughout the ages engaging in various activities. But why are there so few representations of childbirth in visual art? Feminist artist Judy Chicago once suggested that depictions of women giving birth do not commonly occur in Western culture but can be found in other contexts such as pre-Columbian art or societies previously considered “primitive,” such as the pre-Columbian Aztec goddess Tlazolteotl pictured in the act of childbirth (Chicago and Lucie-Smith 1999, 54; Chicago 1985, 34).1 (See notes for web links to images not represented here.) Often these cultures worshipped fertility figures whose power as earth goddesses extended to rich soil, good crops, and healthy human offspring. In contrast, Western culture— particularly imagery influenced by European Christianity—depicted the Virgin Mary only after the birth of the Christ child, bypassing the act itself. Chicago’s own exploration of the theme resulted in the creation of The Birth Project (1980–1985): an unprecedented series of eighty handcrafted works of art created in a variety of needlework techniques by more than 130 artisans that celebrate the experience of birth and a woman’s transformation into motherhood (Chicago 1985).2 But why is The Birth Project an aberration from today’s norm? What are the reasons that childbirth remains a taboo subject in our visual culture? Why is the birthing experience—so pervasive for women—so infrequently celebrated, even by female artists? In earlier times, it was not as uncommon to see explicit images showing women involved in the act of childbirth. Although some contemporary art

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Figure 14.1 Judy Chicago, Birth Tear E 2, 1982, executed by Jane Gaddie Thompson. DMC floss on silk, 15 in. x 22 in. Courtesy of the artist and Through the Flower.

pieces showcase women during pregnancy, most picture them after delivery. One is hard-pressed to fi nd artworks that depict actual crowning at birth, and when found, the subject is usually controversial. Why is this? We argue that long-standing philosophical underpinnings of a Western bias against women have added to the censure of reproductions of childbirth; these underlying principles include (1) sexism, (2) fear of the body, (3) intolerance and distaste for images of pain, and (4) suspicion and distrust of female power—individual and especially communal. Childbirth is a process, but we focus here on the actual act of the deliverance of the child.3 A theoretical grounding functions below the art world and mainstream visual culture to continue to inhibit the production of explicit images of women giving birth. The aesthetics of childbirth is a fragile visual arena—fraught with accompanying issues of female identity, feminine self-consciousness, and even (at times) feminist self-censorship. Interestingly, a defi nite erosion of the taboo is beginning to take place that appears to be precipitated less by the avant-garde of the art world than by the demand of ordinary women seeking—for themselves—the visual reality of human birth. Women have taken it upon themselves to liberate the dissemination of real birth images and in so doing have defied the taboos that inhibit the patriarchal art world. They have become modern midwives, so to speak, of the pictures of birth.

The Aesthetics of Childbirth 217 CULTURAL TRENDS: STILL A TABOO One provocative example of our culture’s reaction to the visual representation of what Judy Chicago called “the moment of birth” (Chicago and Lucie-Smith 1999, 54) can be found in viewer response to “A Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston” by Daniel Edwards.

Figure 14.2 Daniel Edwards, “Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston.” 2006. Life-size. Courtesy of the artist and Capla Kesting Fine Art.

Figure 14.3 Daniel Edwards, “Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston.” 2006. Life-size. Courtesy of the artist and Capla Kesting Fine Art.

218 Peg Brand and Paula Granger

Figure 14.4 Daniel Edwards, “Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston.” 2006. Life-size. Courtesy of the artist and Capla Kesting Fine Art.

Debuting in 2006 at Capla Kestling Fine Art in Brooklyn, the sculpture realistically depicts Britney Spears, nude, down on all fours and splayed out on a bear-skin rug, giving birth to her son, Sean Preston. According to the gallery’s press release, a Madame Tussaud wax figure of Spears doing a stripper’s pole dance was the visual inspiration for the artist’s decision to depict her “seductively posed . . . back arched, pelvis thrust upwards” (Romero 2006).4 This aspect of the work was apparently missed by the conservative pro-life movement that rallied to its support for what it perceived was a celebration of family values. Gallery codirector Lincoln Capla likewise claims the sculpture applauds the decision to place family above career: “A superstar at Britney’s young age having a child is rare in today’s celebrity culture. This dedication honors Britney for the rarity of her choice and bravery of her decision” (Romero 2006). Interestingly, however, the gallery’s official press release photos omit any shots of the actual crowning of the birth, leading one critic to muse: The whole affair leaves the mind clanging with cognitive dissonance, resulting from the collision of elements: the teen idol celebrity, the conservative anti-abortion movement, the explicit (yet sanitized) representation of nudity and birth in a culture so titillated by the former and, often, squeamish about the latter. (Romero 2006)

The Aesthetics of Childbirth 219 What, we might ask, does this writer mean by the term “squeamish”? In researching the work online, one might think there is a stricture on the act of taking a picture of the sculpture from the back, which clearly shows the crowning of the baby’s head. The only image that appears on the Internet of this sculpture from the back is actually a picture of a cast version and not the actual work itself—recognizable by the hinges visible at the joints (Jesse 2006).5 In a world where people can Google anything they want, including images of men and especially of women in compromising and demeaning positions, it is impossible to fi nd a professional picture of the crowning of the child’s head in this piece. The absence of such a photo, in addition to the scarcity of similar birthing images, speaks volumes about the overall cultural climate. As a society, we routinely and profitably glorify pregnancy and motherhood in what one (now defunct) website called the “What to Expect Pregnancy Universe,” yet we are squeamish at the sight of an actual birth (Kukla 2005, 121).6 An entire business resulting in women’s online postings has developed from images of fetuses taken by fetal sonographers (whose shops are often located in suburban strip malls) with names like Womb with a View, Womb’s Window, Sneak Peak Ultrasound, Baby Waves, and Peek-a-Boo. At least one critic noted the obsession within “our image-oriented society” as follows: “We need a fi lm clip (something to put on YouTube, perhaps?) to prove that what we think is happening is real and meaningful” (Epstein 2010, 200).7 Consider another example: audience reaction to Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, particularly the section titled “I Was There in the Room” (Ensler 2008). Audience reaction is markedly uncomfortable when the performance turns to the natural human intolerance for pain during childbirth. Comical to those performing, many people exhibit their discomfort with body shivers, wrinkled noses, furrowed brows, and the occasional gasp. Although the title of the performance is well known in advance, and the audience is therefore well aware that the performance will focus on vaginas, many are not prepared for the frank and disarming discussion of birth. Consider the differing approach to pain in our visual examples so far. In “Birth Tear E 2,” Judy Chicago shows a woman realistically screaming in pain; in another work, “Creation Drawing #2” (not pictured here), she notes, “I was trying to take the cries and screams of a laboring woman and create a visual wail” (Chicago 1985, 12). Alternately, in “A Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston,” Daniel Edwards sanitizes the situation, showing no pain at all; he places Britney on a bear rug, trading on her sex appeal with a cliché soft-porn pose. Undeniably anti-squeamish, this monument to pro-life is remarkably pain free. Although it is clear that images of pregnant women (at least the Virgin Mary) abound in the art world and have become a norm—one standard mode of representing female bodies—art viewers have yet to visually embrace the climactic end to pregnancy. Can considering the pivotal role of

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women in the history of childbirth against the backdrop of men’s predominance in the history of medicine, visual art, and philosophy help to explain the continuing restrictive cultural climate?

HISTORICAL IMAGES: REASONS WHY A TABOO EMERGED Images of childbirth itself were not as uncommon in earlier times. Egyptian motifs show the goddess Ritho giving birth to the god Ra, accompanied by midwives, as well as images of mortal women in childbirth (Arab 2010).8 The one thing that connected the divine and the mortal was the act of childbirth, which took place within the context of shared female knowledge. It is reported that as far back as 1500 BCE or earlier, women had access to explicit information about sex, pregnancy tests, abortions, and contraceptives (Epstein 2010, 5), and Egyptian priests (not midwives or physicians) utilized the technique of podalic version, or the turning of the child in its problematic descent through the birth canal (Rich 1986, 132). In addition, we have images from Hellenistic art, Roman art, and art from the Renaissance. What they share is an interior scene with a birthing mother surrounded by a community of women, whether midwives, family, or friends. In fact, friends of the laboring woman came to be called “gossips” as in “God sibs,” or “siblings of God,” and it is assumed that as they waited, they busied themselves with talk about others (Epstein 2010, 6). Men were routinely absent. A good example of an early group image of women is from the Temple of Hathor at Dendera in ancient Egypt that depicts a squatting woman in the birth position assisted by Hathor and Taweret, goddesses revered at the time.9 Hathor is an ancient, predynastic goddess who was goddess of the sky and sun, and the queen in power (in dynastic times) of music, dance, and the arts. Like Isis, she was a mother goddess to all and was “depicted as a cow bearing the sun disk between her horns, or a woman in queenly raiment wearing the sun disk and horns on her head” (Parsons 2010). The other goddess, known as Taweret—the Great Female—was the ancient Egyptian goddess of maternity and childbirth, protector of women and children. . . . She was both a fierce demonic fighter as well as a popular deity who guarded the mother and her newborn child. She was depicted as a combination of a crocodile, a pregnant hippopotamus standing on her hind legs with large breasts and a lion. . . . All of these animals were man killers, and as such she was a demoness. All three animals were regarded as fierce creatures who would kill to protect their young. (Seawright 2011) Moreover, like Hathor, Taweret was also a goddess relating to fertility. She was a goddess of harvest who also helped with female sexuality and pregnancy.

The Aesthetics of Childbirth 221 Like most Egyptian designs, the composition from the temple is symmetrical with a central focus on the woman who squats, hands on bent knees, elbows pointing out, within an architectural framework that resembles a doorway but more appropriately might be a chair or, in fact, a throne. (This might be Hathor giving birth to her son, Ihy, also known as Harsomtus or Horus.) The goddesses offer aid with outstretched hands, extending a tender and protective touch. The birthing woman assumes the position matter-offactly; there is no visible indication of pain on her face nor apparent struggle or tension in her body. One gets the sense that this is the most natural of acts, culminating the process of a pregnancy brought to term, with little or no travail. It is interesting to note that the deepest part of the carved relief is exactly at the location where the crowning will take place. Atypical of the shallow relief artisans carved at the time, the pending moment of birth is encased deeply within the stone, as if hidden in semidarkness, away from prying eyes and other possible lurking dangers. Most likely, this image provided consolation to numerous women—whether royalty or not—who visited the temple dedicated to Hathor, reassuring them that these goddesses were watching out for them as well. On a more symbolic level, it instructed viewers that women could—and should—be expected to help other women in childbirth. When women worked together, everyone benefited. They felt no need to include men in these depictions given that women and goddesses, sharing and passing down folklore, were able to adequately handle the birth of the newborn. One childbirth scene, a Hellenistic Cypriot limestone sculpture said to be from the temple at Golgoi (310–30 BCE), reinforces the fact that women continued their own communities of physical support and accumulated wisdom.10 A standing attendant, whose head is missing, supports the mother from behind. At the foot of the couch, a seated attendant holds the newborn child. In classical antiquity, childbirth was generally the concern of midwives, as male doctors were called in only for difficult cases. Several of Hippocrates’ treatises discuss childbirth, beginning with the onset of labor as it relates to the movement of the fetus. The most detailed account of labor and delivery is in the fi rst-century A.D. handbook entitled Gynaecology, which was written by the Ephesian physician Soranus (98–138) for midwives. Soranus envisioned delivery on a birthing chair; he describes the dilation of the cervix and the breathing technique to be used in the delivery. He also emphasizes that the midwife and assistants, as depicted in this limestone sculpture from Golgoi, must reassure the mother. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010) Consider a similar Roman example of a woman on a birthing chair supported by midwives.11 Three types of midwives administered to women in Roman times: “the obstetrical midwife, her female assistant, and the

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female priest who chanted prayers for a successful delivery” (Rich 1986, 133–34).Women offered each other solace and wisdom drawn from prior experiences of childbirth, whereas male doctors were called in only for socalled “difficult” cases, a male doctor presumably having more experience with such atypical occurrences. The handbook written by Soranus, which was in use for more than a thousand years (and was clearly out of date by then in light of the evolution of actual practice), was specifically directed to midwives;12 it may seem there was little doubt that they and their assistants could handle most births and male doctors were content to grant women their own private space. A deeper look, however, reveals another strand of thought, one more suspicious, condemning, and long lasting when it came to women, their bodies, and birthing communities. The early history of medicine shows that as far back as Hippocrates’ treatise Epidemics, from the fifth century BCE, women’s reproductive bodies were held to be highly suspect: mysterious, unstable, and potentially dangerous. Hippocratic medicine treated the female body as “structured around a hodos—an open route extending from the orifices of the head to the vagina,” and the uterus was thought capable of not only expanding and contracting but also “wandering throughout the female body, causing disease and distress as it traveled”; hence, the origin of the term “hysteria” and its meaning, “the wandering of the womb” (Kukla 2005, 5). For Hippocrates, the womb was the origin of all female disease and because of its unpredictability, its movement, and its pivotal role as the locus of gestation, it was also considered capable of creating monsters, that is, deformed infants, when things went awry. When a deformed infant was born, none other than the pregnant woman was to blame due to the prevailing sentiment, later augmented by Plato’s theory of the appetite which persists in some contemporary lore that a pregnant woman’s cravings are evidence of an insatiable womb, replete with an appetite of its own, lacking reason and control (Tuana 1992, 1993). An independent womb, traveling throughout the body and enticing foreign substances within, was additionally suspect given Hippocrates’s belief that a woman’s skin was “spongy and porous, making it especially permeable, and making women in turn more susceptible to passions, less protected against corrupting ingestions, and more voracious in their sexuality” (Kukla 2005, 5). Given these pervasive ideas about women’s bodies and the related dangers to which men might be prone in their presence, men successfully avoided most births while women comfortably attended and assisted at them. But the underlying philosophical rationale behind giving women their own womancentric and woman-controlled birthing spaces was double edged in that women’s bodies—defi ned as unpredictable and unmanageable—were left on their own because their bodies, unlike those of men, were seen as being so problematic. Gratifying as it is to see sculptural depictions of several women attending a birth, one can only surmise that if one individual woman was considered suspect by physicians and

The Aesthetics of Childbirth 223 philosophers, a group of women must have been even more so. Also, a woman overstepping her so-called “natural” bounds of submission to men was more than suspicious; it was unacceptable, perhaps unthinkable. Let us now consider the role of the midwife, the most knowledgeable of the support group, and how her role changed over the course of history. A stone relief from Isola Dell’ Sacra, Ostia, dating from the fi rst century CE portrays a woman using a birthing chair, aided by a midwife ready to assist below and an assistant who holds the woman steady from behind.13 A mythic folk hero who continues to inspire midwives today emerged from third century Athens by the name of Agnodice, her story comes down to us through Hyginus, a Latin author of the fi rst century CE, and provides telling evidence that men are not only suspicious of the intelligence and intentions of an individual female who surpasses her allotted station in life but are even more fearful of the power that arises when women band together: A certain maiden named Agnodice desired to learn medicine and since she desired to learn she cut her hair, donned the clothes of a man, and became a student of Herophilos. After she learned medicine, she heard a woman crying out in the throes of labor so she went to her assistance. The woman, thinking she was a man, refused her help; but Agnodice lifted up her clothes and revealed herself to be a woman and was thus able to treat her patient. When the male doctors found that their services were not wanted by the women, they began to accuse Agnodice, saying that she had seduced the women and they accused the women of feigning illness [to get visits from Agnodice]. When she was brought before the law court, the men began to condemn Agnodice. Agnodice once again lifted her tunic to show that she was indeed a woman. The male doctors began to accuse her all the more vehemently [for breaking the law forbidding women to study medicine]. At this point the wives of the leading men arrived saying “you men are not spouses but enemies since you are condemning her who discovered health for us.” Then the Athenians emended the law so that freeborn women could study medicine.14 Even if this story is fiction, the power of folklore is mirrored in the widely held view of women, particularly midwives, who are considered less capable than men, a sentiment most fully promoted in the fourth century BCE by Aristotle who succinctly deemed women to be not just inferior to men, but defective beings. Feminist philosopher Nancy Tuana notes the influence upon Aristotle by the ancient writer of myths, Hesiod: Hesiod described woman as man’s punishment, for man must spend his life balancing the good and bad in woman lest her bad qualities overwhelm her good ones. Both Plato and Aristotle agreed with Hesiod,

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Peg Brand and Paula Granger arguing that the passions must be controlled by reason, but woman’s inferior rational faculties are inadequate to control her own passions. (Tuana 1993, 80)

This sentiment influenced Western philosophy through succeeding generations. It is not surprising to discover that men eventually came to usurp the role of midwife, although centuries would pass before this actually happened. The combination of sentiments from Hippocrates, Hesiod, Plato, and Aristotle lent credence to the beliefs that women were less rational, less controllable (certainly as it pertains to their bodily functions), less virtuous (more apt to succumb to temptations from outside the body, i.e., influences upon their appetites), and therefore less than fully human. If women are deemed incapable of individual control, how much more threatening is the “group think” of women, particularly when they challenge or oppose male power? The legacy of Aristotle’s thinking proved a powerful underlying rationale for justifying the end of female midwifery. Eliminating the female assistants as well as the midwife’s assistants eventually provided a philosophical rationale to destroy the long-enduring support and power of these female communities. Somewhat later, in the twelfth century, we see an image of a midwife and her assistant helping to guide twins into the world (Nunnery World Scriptorium Timeline 2010).15 This image is explicit and clear, showing two heads in the crowning that emerge from a woman who appears to have no birthing chair but rather hovers awkwardly in space, held up by an assistant. The women in attendance seem nonplussed by the event in contrast to the birthing woman, who turns away, holds one hand to her mouth, and extends the other aloft in an unnatural pose. Taken from a codex, the style reflects the standard lack of perspective, patterned background, and simple figures of medieval manuscript illumination. Unlike earlier depictions in which the crowning is hidden in darkness when the view is frontal (the Egyptian) or averted by posing the woman in profile on a birthing chair (Greek and Roman), the Middle Ages often relished a more literal interpretation of biblical stories and human ills by utilizing more realistic and even grotesque manners of style. Ugly gargoyles and fearsome devils routinely adorned churches; a similar bravado was used to depict full frontal nudity in this unabashed portrayal of the moment of birth. Surprisingly, within such a strict, hierarchical, male-dominated Christian context, a community of women still persists.16 The influence of Aristotle is held at bay, at least for a while, but images of crowning at the moment of birth soon begin to fade from view. During the Renaissance, women were often pictured within “confi nement rooms,” decorated with painted wooden chests and various objects around the pregnant woman indicating higher class and status.17 They were either seated next to or reclining in elaborate beds with heavy drapery. Surrounded by various helpers, one of whom might comfort or bathe the

The Aesthetics of Childbirth 225 newborn, these scenes were often commemorated on double-sided painted wooden childbirth trays, platters, or bowls as forms of domestic art (Musacchio 1999, 4). The trays were given as gifts to pregnant women for good luck. The moment of birth, however, is not itself portrayed; rather, a woman might be shown swooning or leaning on another while labor begins or pictured reclining in bed, covered with blankets. In an Italian example, a midwife tends to the woman seated on a birthing stool: one hand is placed between the woman’s legs, partially hidden by her skirt, awaiting delivery. When the woman is shown in bed recuperating from the birth, friends bring her trays of fruit and food—a deliberate and playful self-reference to the gifted trays themselves. The infant is nearby, being fed by a wet nurse, and a defi nite air of celebration fills the room. Very rarely is a man shown in the scene, and if he is, he is the husband lending moral support. For the next few centuries, the private domestic sphere in which midwives operated began to change drastically, and by the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, women’s private pregnancies culminating in femalecentered birthing communities were usurped by the public domain of the male-dominated medicalization of childbirth. The first encroachment upon female midwifery is attributed to a marketing wizard in the Middle Ages, Dr. Eucharius Rösslin, who published the fi rst book focused solely on pregnancy and childbirth in 1513 that became a best seller (translated into at least five languages) for two hundred years, The Rose Garden for Pregnant Women and Midwives (Epstein 2010, 15). Translated into English in 1540 as The Byrthe of Mankynde, the text contained a poem that insulted midwives, encouraged other male physicians to denounce their work, and spearheaded the change in sentiment toward female-only birthing occasions (Epstein 2010, 16). Men, ever wary of female physicality and midwives’ skills, were urged “to abhor and loathe the company of women” (Rich 1986, 138).18 But the decisive shift in thinking is attributed to the invention and secretive use of forceps by “man midwives” of the Chamberlen family, who began their business in England in 1569 and extended their reach into the 1700s. Not only did they force a change in women’s birthing position—by moving them off the birthing stool to a prone position to use the tool to extract a fetus stuck in the birthing canal—but they also secured an increasing number of grateful women as their clientele that resulted in driving female midwives out of business (Epstein 2010, 20–29). (Midwives also lost their business to men when they were accused of witchcraft when something went wrong with their deliveries.) Forceps were generally in use until the 1880s when, like today, caesarean-sections became more popular: pre-forceps birth was a social and spiritual event. The midwife—the female midwife—crouched in front of the laboring woman rubbing the perineum with oils and herbs. Often, she used a birthing stool, a doughnut-shaped chair that allowed gravity to help the baby slip out.

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Peg Brand and Paula Granger No men allowed. Post-forceps, men would gradually become a routine presence. Doctors did not like stools. They preferred the patient lying in bed where they could use their tools with ease. (Epstein 2010, 18)

Rich devotes an entire chapter to the transition from “hands of flesh” to “hands of iron”: The masculine “hands of iron”—the forceps—were, and still are, often used with mechanistic brutality and unconcern to hasten a normal labor, causing brain damage to the infant and perforation of delicate tissues in the mother, both totally unnecessary. The wasteful and disastrous split in the profession must be laid at the door of male prejudice and the power of a male-dominated establishment to discredit and drive out even the most talented women practitioners. (Rich 1986, 142) Judy Chicago continues the history of the gradual decline of midwives within the context of medical education in her extensive research to create The Birth Project: After the Revolutionary War, American doctors traveled to Europe for instruction. Near the end of the eighteenth century, formal training began in the United States, and, by 1807, five American medical schools offered courses in midwifery. Some professors of midwifery began to call themselves obstetricians, or professors of obstetrics, shunning the term “midwife” because of its feminine connotation. At fi rst, training in midwifery was offered to men and women alike; but because women were excluded from the developing medical schools, they were discredited as the most desirable childbirth attendants. (Chicago 1985, 192) By the early nineteenth century, women’s birthing still occurred at home, but it was no longer the open and shared “natural” social event it had been up until that time; it became a formalized and private affair with the mandatory presence of a male doctor who supervised “the patient.” Midwives protested, but doctors argued that women’s intellectual inferiority and inability to be sufficiently trained to the specialized (no longer “natural”) task of caring for birthing women left no choice but to reserve the domain of obstetrics exclusively for men. The midwives’ joint protest at the time probably served to confi rm and intensify male suspicion and distrust of communities of women. A similar alienation of women from the practice took place abroad as well. In seventeenth-century Europe, numerous treatises on gynecology, obstetrics, and midwifery were authored by physicians for a broad reading audience—particularly pregnant women and their female midwives. These texts included the fi rst obstetrical drawings of the female body (stylized, not realistic), obstetrical tools, and monstrous births (Kukla 2005, 8). Pregnant

The Aesthetics of Childbirth 227 women were warned directly of “sights and substances that could pollute or deform the womb” (Kukla 2005, 11). As female midwives were dismissed as inadequate birth facilitators, male doctors predominated, which caused changes in the texts and their usage as well. They became authoritarian documents cited by doctors to their “patients” thereby inserting themselves as middlemen between the pregnant woman and the necessary medical information. The medical institutionalization of female pregnancy and birth had begun. Women were no longer in charge; a doctor was needed at all times during delivery and particularly during the dangerous time of pregnancy when her uncontrollable appetites, cravings, passions, and desires might go astray and cause deformity or death within the womb.19 In tandem with the rise of doctors’ paternal monitoring of their subjects, Rousseau introduced unprecedented public attention to the maternal body as a matter of civic pride and responsibility with his famous Enlightenment treatise on the education of children titled Emile, or On Education, published in 1755 in France. Rousseau proposed a notion of rationality along Platonic lines that involved a harmony of reason and emotion, but advocated that the education of girls into their proper social roles of wives and mothers be different from that of boys (Tuana 1992, 47). Girls should be educated to perform their duties, namely, to “please men, to be useful to them, to make herself loved and honored by them . . . to make their lives agreeable and sweet” (Rousseau 1979, 365). Women were to learn to use their coquetry to charm and satisfy their husbands, as they also learned to obey. This submissive devotion was necessary to insure the proper working of the state. In a brief passage of Emile, Rousseau wrote his only words on the topic of nursing, which had a profound influence on both the French Republic and Enlightenment thinking and continue to influence views on breastfeeding today: Do you want to bring everyone back to his fi rst duties? Begin with mothers. You will be surprised by the changes you will produce. Everything follows successively from this fi rst depravity [wet nursing]. . . . But let mothers deign to nurse their [own] children, morals will reform themselves, nature’s sentiments will be awakened in every heart, the state will be repopulated. This first point, this alone, will bring everyone back together. (Rousseau 1979, 46) Rousseau pressed mothers to be the originators of a natural human order within society. They were responsible for self-regulation and self-legislation that gave rise to a “general will” of cooperation within Enlightenment democracy. Rousseau’s thinking requires the maternal body to conform to the newly stated ideals of social order and, moreover, “closely follows Plato’s discussion in Book IV of the Republic on the key role of the nurses, mothers, and early childhood practices in forming the bodily foundation for the properly free and civically appropriate citizen”

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(Kukla 2005, 41). There is no doubt that pregnant and lactating bodies became subject to increased public scrutiny, monitoring, and male control. The depiction in the art world of birthing women becomes similarly controlled; as mounting taboos arise to circumscribe women’s roles and subsequent actions within society, a similar proscription against the depiction of birthing bodies takes hold in the realm of fi ne art. Childbirth is not a major topic until the twentieth century when women start to challenge the taboo.

CULTURAL TRENDS: CHALLENGES TO THE TABOO It would be some years later before artists such as Frida Kahlo and Judy Chicago come on the scene to offer faint lights of hope at the end of a very long and dark tunnel. Kahlo, the well-known Mexican artist experienced serious medical problems upon the apparent loss of a fetus in 1932 while visiting the U.S. with her husband, Diego Rivera, who had been commissioned to do work in Detroit. My Birth is one of two paintings that depict her pain and suffering at that loss (Zamora 1990, 45–46). Nothing like a celebratory crowning, Kahlo’s image is somber and terrifying. Kahlo is alone on the bed, with no one present, much less a community of women as support, and the covering of her face—as if she herself were dead—additionally referenced the fact that she had lost her own mother in the same year. 20 A second painting from 1932 titled Henry Ford Hospital shows Frida alone again, lying bleeding on a bed, with red ropes tied to a fetus hovering in the air against the backdrop of a dismal and diminished landscape of Detroit in the background. 21 In contrast, Chicago’s The Birth Project celebrates women’s empowerment through the act of birth; nevertheless, she did not hesitate to depict the pain or minimize the physical difficulty most women experience. She suggests that the taboo against images of birthing in art gradually began to erode when men were allowed to attend the births of their children in the 1970s; in fact, she recorded her own attendance in 1980 at a friend’s birthing experience, while executing drawings that played a role in the execution of the larger artworks in the project. Epstein offers a similar rationale to the softening of the mandated physician-only attended births as being emblematic of a time when women were becoming empowered and challenging physicians’ authority in the delivery room. She cites the rise of the use of natural birthing techniques, for example, Lamaze (which developed fi rst in Europe in the late 1950s; Epstein 2010, 109–28) and the advent of 1970s “freebirthers” who sought a birthing experience free of all medical intervention, usually in the privacy of one’s home, attended by family (Epstein 2010, 169–86). Chicago’s introduction of vivid birth imagery—both at the individual level of a single woman’s lived experience and also the allegorical level

The Aesthetics of Childbirth 229 of goddess and creation imagery—was an astonishing feat within the art world of the 1980s. It followed her controversial debut in 1979 of The Dinner Party, which depicted the rise of female empowerment against the oppression of patriarchy, so-called “cunt imagery” meticulously hand painted on china plates (Chicago 1996). The Birth Project was also collaborative, inviting more than one hundred workers to lend their skills in needlework to the fi nal artworks, some of which took up an entire gallery wall, for example, Earth Birth (1983, sprayed Versatex and DMC floss on fabric, 63 in. x 135 in.; Chicago 1985, 100–1) and Birth Trinity NP (1983, Paternayan yarn on 6-mesh canvas, 51.5 in. x 133 in.; Chicago 1985, 114–15). Imagery from The Crowning is a particularly apt subject for us to explore through Chicago’s work. She executed the subject matter in a variety of mediums: preparatory drawings; (batik) quilting that included details of lace and (reverse) appliqué; embroidery with DMC floss on silk; crochet that utilized more than seventy thousand stitches in one work; and multihued needlepoint on mesh canvas, for example, The Crowning NP 4 in which DMC floss is strategically combined with yarn to utilize bargello and basket weave stitches (Chicago 1985, 45). No squeamishness here, as Chicago and Yablonsky create a rich texture of hues and powerful black lines that combine to effectively transmit the act of birth at its crowning achievement (pardon the pun). Yablonsky’s comments at the time are still

Figure 14.5 The Crowning NP 4. 1984. Needlepoint by Frannie Yablonsky. DMC floss and Paternayan yarn on 18-mesh canvas. 30.5 in. x 51 in. Courtesy of the artist and Through the Flower.

230 Peg Brand and Paula Granger appropriate today, forcing us to wonder why, more than twenty-five years later, the art world is still slow to recognize the power of these and similar images honoring women and their emerging identities who, as active agents, give birth through pain and procreate the species: Today, in the midst of breathing techniques, fetal monitoring machines, and obstetrical procedures, the fact that birth is a celebration is often lost. Prints of these images should be on the walls of labor rooms to remind the birthing woman, doctors, nurses, and families of the celebration of giving birth. (Chicago 1985, 46) Two other examples of crowning are worth noting, the fi rst by Jonathan Waller, who reports that as a British painter and father, he had difficulty in the 1990s exhibiting his realistic series of birth paintings, such as Mother No. 27 from 1996 (Chicago and Lucie-Smith 1999, 54–55). Sara Star recently introduced a religious aspect to the depiction of crowning—a rare departure from the art world’s norm of sanitized female nudes and no births—for instance, in her work Crowning: Mary Giving Birth to Christ. 22 Neither of these artists have enjoyed much exposure in the art world, a sure sign that their works are neither popular nor well known, and a possible sign that the content of their works is not deemed worthy or appropriate for so-called high art/fine art consumption, such art that is often purchased for its capacity to be a profit-enhancing long-term fi nancial investment. The insertion of religious content into an image of crowning is certain to cause consternation: does anyone really want to see the Christ child emerging from the womb? This is too human and ungodly, and certainly too female a beginning. Recall the quote by Rich at the beginning of this chapter; if men resist identifying with their female origins, how much more reluctant might we be to acknowledge the human female origins of the Son of God? All of us—men and women—are much more comfortable conjuring up numerous images of the Virgin Mary suckling her child calmly and lovingly after the traumatic and lowly human event. We romanticize the nativity by placing her in a stable: just an earlier version of the Renaissance confi nement room, minus the women. To what do we owe this continuing lack of representation of an experience that all naturally birthing mothers share? Patriarchy has long oppressed women, which has resulted in many facets of women’s lives being hidden— the ones deemed unpleasant or unimportant by great literary and philosophical thinkers. History routinely deletes or devalues women’s lived experiences; Simone de Beauvoir’s argument for woman’s status as the second sex certainly initiated a feminist critique of history that has yet to be fully written (Beauvoir 2010). However, in spite of this, women continue to create their own communities made up of friends and family and midwives to help them through the difficulties of birth. Note the growing number of Afghan women trained as midwives today in a country with the world’s second highest death rate of

The Aesthetics of Childbirth 231 women during pregnancy and childbirth; with 80% of women giving birth without any skilled help, only one-third receives any medical care at all during pregnancy (Grady 2009).23 As mentioned earlier, common to many of the images we studied were depictions of women surrounded by communities of support—communities that survived in spite of oppressive forces. Unfortunately, such communities could not prevail when male doctors replaced midwives and sterile hospital beds replaced familiar home settings. Doctors became increasingly important at delivery as well as throughout pregnancy, and by the twentieth century, hospital stays for birthing women were standard. Before 1900, 5% of women delivered at a hospital; by 1970, the number had jumped to 99% (Leavitt 1986).24 A recent phenomenon on YouTube is a perfect example of how women long for, and have revived, a network to educate and share (Wollan 2009). According to Eugene Declercq, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, “a hundred and fi fty years ago women viewed birth on a pretty regular basis—they saw their sisters or neighbors giving birth;” it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that birthing moved out of living rooms and bedrooms into hospitals. It is not surprising that most women then, like today, had few opportunities to witness live births, relying only upon word of mouth and perhaps on a family member’s personal video footage. But all that has changed as birthing videos have begun to appear on YouTube, numbering in the thousands, ranging from “women giving birth under hypnosis, to Caesarean sections, to births in bathtubs” (Wollan 2009). In fact, some videos have been reportedly watched more than three million times. As one mother whose video is posted online unabashedly recounts, “Childbirth is beautiful and I’m not a private person” (Wollan 2009). On display is real birth—pain included. In addition, women who post their videos are eager to communicate with others by email to maintain a virtual community of women, both inquisitive and supportive, to disseminate information and pass on accumulated fi rsthand knowledge. Some have found the graphic nature of public childbirth videos controversial and even “gross” as evidenced by an online forum hosted by Parenting magazine. As reported at this venue, reactions are split between those who think the postings of home videos are great and those who think they are gross, ranging from “I think it’s great for moms to see all the different and real ways women give birth” to “My question is why do these people feel the need to post it on the Internet?!” (Wollan 2009). But the cultural impact is indisputable as even childbirth classes have taken advantage of the options available online to use unedited, candid, graphic footage of birthing situations in contemporary (primarily home, not hospital) settings. The floodgates have been opened; images of actual crowning abound. And far from being delivered by women operating in the art world where the taboo is still strong, they have been launched by ordinary women seeking knowledge and offering a community spirit of power and empowerment reminiscent of ancient practices.

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Another challenge to the current taboo comes from the recent world of Hollywood filmmaking, and again, not from the avant-garde art world. Judd Apatow, writer-director of The 40 Year-Old Virgin made a conscious decision in his 2007 film entitled Knocked Up to include an “original” way to document the birth scene of the main female character who is impregnated by a less-than-serious twenty-three-year old Los Angeles pothead. Searching for ways that defied previous limits, Apatow “was determined to show as much as the audience could bear, even if it meant he had to include a shot of the baby in the minutes before it leaves the mother” (Caddell 2007): I just want to show what is real . . . I show a crowning shot because if I don’t show that, then I am just doing an episode of Friends. I am trying to make you feel the pain of that experience because it is the most intense moment in people’s lives, and I had to do something that hadn’t been done before. (Caddell 2007) Like the YouTube videos posted by birthing mothers, Apatow insists on a form of realism that—unlike Edwards’s Britney-on-a-bear-rug—resembles Kahlo’s and Chicago’s inclusion of pain, in order to be as faithful to reality as possible: My original goal was to fi nd a woman who would allow me to shoot the baby coming out and match it to the real shot. I wanted to use the same sheets and the same bed. We came close to getting it done, but the state of California said, “You can’t do it because the unborn child would need a worker’s permit.” Of course, I couldn’t get that until it was born! (Caddell 2007) Apatow, a male director, pushes the limits of popular culture against a longstanding taboo that has circumscribed women’s depictions and actions. He seems to have felt little apprehension in doing so: “Though some suggested that the birthing scene was too graphic, I left in three quick shots of the baby crowning.” When he attended the initial screening, he reported the audience “roared their approval” (quoted in Rodrick 2007). He had succeeded in breaking new ground. The taboo was dissolving before our very eyes.

CONCLUSION Some might argue that the images of the moment of birth are just too explicit and this is simply too much reality. It is worth recalling that a birth movie made in 1938 by the American Committee on Maternal Welfare, The Birth of a Baby, was only shown after local doctors sanctioned the fi lm and then only because it showed the birth of the newborn “through drapes of sheets” (Epstein 2010, 109–10). Moreover, in 1953, actress Lucille Ball—who was

The Aesthetics of Childbirth 233 pregnant in real life—was reluctantly allowed to appear on her hit television show only if she did not utter the word “pregnant”; the writers substituted “expectant” instead (Epstein 2010, 124–25). Finally, in the late 1950s, the French fi lm Naissance, which showed an actual and natural birth, was deemed obscene, even for prenatal classes; a full year passed before it was shown at the Mt. Sinai Medical Center by Elisabeth Bing, founder of Lamaze International (Epstein 2010, 109–12). Many people just can’t handle seeing the pain, the blood, and the variety of other bodily materials that might be involved. But many of those same people don’t bat an eye when watching blood-and-guts imagery of war movies (admittedly fake) or actual war reporting: more proof that the experiences of men (including fake, acted experiences) are valued over those of women. Virginia Woolf once wrote about the different values men and women found in life and, consequently, the values they expressed in their writing: This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. (Woolf 1957, 77) The traditional location and space of birthing has not typically been the drawing room, but rather a more restrictive version of that space: the birthing chair, the confinement room, the hospital room. If Woolf is correct in her assessment of how cultures evaluate women’s activities, how much more frequently and grandly would we celebrate and memorialize—in visual art deemed “high” and “fine”—the profound and challenging experiences involved in giving birth: if only women’s activities were not assumed to be insignificant!

NOTES 1. The pre-Columbian Aztec goddess Tlazolteotl-Ixuina in the act of childbirth, as photographed by Man Ray, is composed of aplite (8 in. x 4 3/4 in. x 5 7/8 in.; see http://www.artres.com/c/htm/CSearchZ.aspx?o=&Total=2 &FP=359580&E=22SIJM56SK8GC&SID=JMGEJNBPNOMI3&Pic=1& SubE=2UNTWAIYLQ8S (accessed October 1, 2011). This sculpture proved inspirational in the 1980s for the making of several versions of the crowning for Chicago’s multiperson collaborative The Birth Project. 2. For Judy Chicago’s website, see http://www.judychicago.com (accessed October 1, 2011). 3. We also recognize the word “mother” presents complications. When does motherhood begin, at birth or before? Is a woman considered a mother if her child does not survive the birth itself? We will not confront these questions in this chapter. 4. The image, from Capla Kestling Fine Art, can also be found at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3c/Spearssculpture.jpg (accessed October 1, 2011). 5. Shown only online is a reverse-angle shot by photographer Justin Farrow at http://gawker.com/165659/britney-and-child-as-youve-never-seen-them-

234 Peg Brand and Paula Granger

6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

before (accessed October 1, 2011). The website warns, “Click to enlarge, if you must” and “Now we see why they [the gallery] only sent the front views.” Kukla notes the “canonization” of the book What to Expect When You’re Expecting as the bible of pregnant women along with accompanying marketing and websites for organizing one’s pregnancy, recording the fetus’s progress (along with the woman’s own growth), consulting cookbooks, and engaging in the commercialization of the process in what she cites as contemporary culture’s inclination to treat the “uterus as public theater” (Kukla 2005, chap. 4, 105–44). Epstein here cites B. H. Kevles, Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic, 1997). http://pharaohsdays.blogspot.com/2010/10/diseases-of-women-and-childrenin.html (accessed October 1, 2011). Squatting woman giving birth assisted by two goddesses Hathor and Taweret from the Temple of Hathor, Dendera, ca. 323–30 BCE: http://www. artres.com/c/htm/CSearchZ.aspx?o=&Total=58&FP=362279&E=22SIJM5 6SBDVJ&SID=JMGEJNBPNRNRN&Pic=42&SubE=2UNTWAWMWBEZ (accessed October 1, 2011). Limestone statuette of a childbirth scene located at the Temple of Golgoi, Cypriot, Hellenistic, ca. 310–30 BCE, limestone 6 1/2 in. x 10 in (approx.); located at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, http://www.metmuseum.org/Works_of_Art/ collection_database/greek_and_roman_art/limestone_statuette_of_a_childbirth_scene//objectview.aspx?OID=130002715&collID=13&dd1=13 (accessed October 1, 2011). Scene of childbirth, Roman ivory panel in relief, from Cumae, second century BCE, example of woman on a birthing chair supported by midwives (Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples, Italy). http://www.artres.com/c/htm/CSearchZ. aspx?o=&Total=2&FP=364687&E=22SIJM56SBYKN&SID=JMGEJNBPNX G2H&Pic=2&SubE=2UNTWAGF3V0Y (accessed October 1, 2011). Adrienne Rich wonders how male writers acquired the knowledge to compose medical treatises as they were typically not present at births. But as she notes of the time, “women did not write books” (Rich 1986, 134). Both Rich and Epstein are skeptical of men’s supposed expertise at the time. Scene of a birth with midwife, stone relief from Isola Dell’ Sacra, Ostia, dating from the fi rst through the third century CE (Museo Ostiense, Ostia, Italy). http://www.artres.com/c/htm/CSearchZ.aspx?o=&Total=2&FP=36 4687&E=22SIJM56SBYKN&SID=JMGEJNBPNXG2H&Pic=2&SubE=2UNTWAGF3V0Y (accessed October 1, 2011). The website suggests that terra cotta figurines of women lifting their garments, which date from the fi fth to third centuries BCE, are generally interpreted as apotropaic, driving evil forces away. It is interesting to note that midwives from the seventeenth century to the present have been known to invoke this tale to defend themselves against a male-dominated profession seeking to medicalize childbirth. http://www.hsl.virginia/historical/artifacts/ antiqua/women.cfm (accessed October 9, 2011). http://mw.mcmaster.ca /scriptorium /images/3008w- Childbirth.html (accessed October 1, 2011). In Get Me Out, Epstein reproduces a fi fteenth-century woodcut, one of the fi rst obstetric scenes to appear in a printed book, in which a baby is being delivered by cesarean section to a dying mother. Even in this image, no man is present in the room (Epstein 2010, 156). For an example from a recent exhibit at the Kimbell Art Museum (2009), see http://www.kimbellart.org/artandlove/child_birth_tray_bowl.asp (accessed October 1, 2011).

The Aesthetics of Childbirth 235 18. There is a discrepancy in the two accounts of this text. Epstein considers the 1540 publication to be a translation of the Byrth of Mankynde to be an English translation by Thomas Raynalde of The Rose Garden for Pregnant Women and Midwives (Epstein 2010, 15). Rich considers it a translation into English of a Latin text on midwifery, De Partu Hominis (Rich 1986, 138). It should be noted that both concur that like earlier writers of treatises, Rösslin was terribly uninformed; he “never saw a baby born, studied childbirth, or was even up-to-date on contemporary practices” (Epstein 2010, 15). 19. An extreme example involved a report of a woman who “conceived and brought forth an Etheopian because she looked at a painting of a black man during conception,” as noted by John Sadler, The Sicke Woman’s Private Looking-Glasse (1636; reprinted, London: Theatrum Orbis, 1977; Kukla 2005, 15). Kukla also reports that this case forms the frontispiece to Aristotle’s Masterpiece, or the Secret of Generation Displayed in All the Parts Thereof, published anonymously in London in 1684. 20. http://www.frida-kahlo-foundation.org/My-Birth-1932.html (accessed October 1, 2011). 21. http://w w w.frida-kahlo-foundation.org / Henry-Ford-Hospital.html (accessed October 1, 2011). 22. See Sara Schnelle, Crowning: Mary Giving Birth to Christ, n.d., 5 ft. x 5 ft., acrylic with 23-kt. gold leaf, http://www.schnellestudios.com/birthart.html (accessed October 1, 2011). 23. The author praises Pashtoon Azfar, director of Afghanistan’s Institute of Health Sciences and president of the Afghan Midwives Association. As Grady notes (reminding us of the philosophical underpinnings of sexism in Western societies), “the deeper problems are cultural, rooted in the low status of women and the misperception that deaths in childbirth are inevitable—part of the natural order, women’s lot in life.” In some remote areas of the country, women are not even allowed to seek medical help from a male doctor. 24. Maureen E. Stevens, “Introduction: Born in the USA,” in The Best Birth Book: A Physiological, Psychological, Emotional and Spiritual Guide (2010), http://www.childbirths.com/intro.html (accessed October 1, 2011). The quote is attributed to J. W. Leavitt (1986), Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 12, 171).

WORKS CITED Arab, Sameh M. 2010. Medicine in Ancient Egypt. Part 2 of 3, “Diseases of Women and Children.” Accessed October 1, 2011. http://www.arabworldbooks.com/ articles8b.htm. Beauvoir, Simone de. 2010. The Second Sex. Trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Caddell, Ian. 2007. “Birth Scene Crowns Saucy Knocked Up.” May 24. Accessed October 1, 2011. http://www.straight.com/article-92214/birth-scene-crownssaucy-knocked-up. Chicago, Judy. 1985. The Birth Project. New York: Doubleday. . 1996. The Dinner Party. New York: Penguin. Chicago, Judy, and Edward Lucie-Smith. 1999. Women and Art: Contested Territory. New York: Watson-Guptill. Claude Moore Health Sciences Library. 2010. Women in Medicine: Childbirth Scene. Stone relief. University of Virginia Health Sciences Library. Accessed October 1, 2011. http://www.hsl.virginia.edu/historical/artifacts/antiqua/women.cfm.

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Ensler, Eve. 2008. Vagina Monologues. New York: Villard / Random House. Epstein, Randi Hutter. 2010. Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank. New York: W. W. Norton. Grady, Denise. 2009. “In War and Isolation, a Fighter for Afghan Women.” New York Times, July 28, D5. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/health/28midw. html?scp=1&sq=In%20War%20and%20Isolation,%20a%20Fighter%20 for%20afghan%20women&st=cse. Jesse. 2006. “Britney and Child as You’ve Never Seen Them Before.” Expanded Gawker, April 6. http://gawker.com/165659/britney-and-child-as-youve-neverseen-them-before. Kukla, Rebecca. 2005. Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and Mothers’ Bodies. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Leavitt, J. W. Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750–1950. New York: Oxford University Press. Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2010. “Childbirth scene from the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.” Accessed October 1, 2011. http://www.metmuseum.org/ toah/works-of-art/74.51.2698. Musacchio, Jacqueline Marie. 1999. The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Nunnery World Scriptorium Timeline. 2010. “Childbirth.” From Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. http://mw.mcmaster.ca/scriptorium/images/3008wChildbirth.html. Parsons, Marie. 2010. “Hathor.” Accessed October 1, 2011. http://www.touregypt.net/godsofegypt/hathor.htm. Rich, Adrienne. 1986. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. 10th anniversary edition. New York: W. W. Norton. Rodrick, Stephen. 2007. “Judd Apatow’s Family Values.” New York Times Magazine, May 27. Accessed October 1, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/ magazine/27apatow-t.html. Romero, C. Antonio. 2006. “Daniel Edwards Sculpture ‘Monument to Pro-Life’: Britney Spears as Madonna with Child.” CultureKiosque, July 7. Accessed October 1, 2011. http://www.culturekiosque.com/art/exhibiti/britney_spears_ birth_sculpture.html. Rousseau, Jean Jacques. 1979. Emile, or On Education. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic. Seawright, Caroline. “Tawaret, Godess, Demoness of Birth, Rebirth and the Northern Sky.” Accessed October 1, 2011. http://www/touregypt.net/featurestories/tawaret.htm. Star, Sara. 2010. Crowning: Mary Giving Birth to Christ. Painting. http://www. schnellestudios.com/birthart.html. Superstock. 2010. “Scene of Childbirth.” Photograph of Roman sculpture. Museum of History of Medicine, Rome, Italy. Accessed October 1, 2011. http://www. superstock.com/stock-photos-images/1039-15091. Tuana, Nancy. 1992. Woman and the History of Philosophy. New York: Paragon House. . 1993. The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious, and Philosophical Conceptions of Woman’s Nature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wollan, Maria. 2009. “Lights, Camera, Contraction!” New York Times, June 11. Accessed October 1, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/fashion/11BIRTHS. html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=lights,%20camera,%20contractions&st=cse. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Zamora, Martha. 1990. Frida Kahlo: The Brush of Anguish. Trans. Marilyn Sode Smith. San Francisco: Chronicle.

15 The Sublimity of Gestating and Giving Birth Toward a Feminist Conception of the Sublime Sheila Lintott

INTRODUCTION Having been gestated and having been born are two of the very few experiences common to all human beings. In fact, they may be the only common experiences. Although gestating and giving birth to a child are not universally shared experiences, they are experiences shared by many, many women the world over. These experiences, with their odd mixtures of pain and pleasure, distance and intimacy, mortality and life, vulnerability and strength, fear and love, and selfishness and selflessness, are remarkably distinctive from virtually every other experience open to human beings. This does not stop us from drawing comparisons with and using them as metaphorical bases to explore other experiences. Gestating and giving birth afford great homes for our metaphors and hyperboles because they can be both grueling and profound. Akin to losing a loved one or falling in love, gestating and giving birth are the sort of experiences that can’t be fully understood in the abstract. One must have the experience to grasp its general and personal significance. Even after having had these experiences, some struggle to fully comprehend them, whereas others avoid seriously reflecting on them, perhaps due to their existential potency. Giving birth is sometimes referred to as a transformative experience, one that can transform a woman into a new person while she births another new person. And it is difficult to speak about gestating and giving birth without sounding cliché, sentimental, grotesque, or even mystical. Perhaps this helps to explain why the experience of giving birth is so woefully underrepresented and underexplored in Western culture; that is, perhaps it is too difficult to accurately capture the experience without slipping into one of these realms. As a result, although we sometimes fi nd ourselves surrounded by maternal imagery, we are denied authentic discussion, analysis, and representation of the subjective experience of gestating and giving birth. Instead, we are offered trivial representations that train us to deify or revile gestating and birthing women. In this chapter, I analyze the complex experiences and insights that can accompany gestating and giving birth, considering them in light of

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philosophical theories of the sublime. My central concern here is whether and how gestating and giving birth might consist of various sublime experiences. Some might wonder whether aligning gestating and giving birth with the sublime is problematical insofar as the sublime is typically theorized in masculinist terms and for masculinist ideals. This concern, I maintain, only illustrates the need for feminist conceptions of the sublime.1 A feminist conception of the sublime would be able to convey the existential centrality and importance of gestating and giving birth without reducing the experience to one of domination as is common in classical, masculinist conceptions of the sublime. Although there is room here to suggest that those who support and witness the one who gestates and gives birth might also be conversant with this feminist sublime, my focus here is on the subjective experience of the one who gestates and gives birth. Finally, I close with thoughts on how this conception of a feminist sublime affords us with a critique of some of the patriarchal aspects of theories of the abject, the sublime, and the beautiful. This project focuses on the aesthetics of some maternal experiences, but as will emerge throughout the discussion, also has philosophical implications for and connections with other fields of philosophy, such as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and social and political philosophy.

GESTATION: “TRANQUILITY TINGED WITH TERROR” Gestation and birthing do not have distinct beginnings, middles, and ends. For most women, the subjective experiences of gestation and birth will begin after they realize they are pregnant. But for others, for example, for those who have seen their lives moving intentionally toward or intentionally working to avoid gestation and birth, these experiences might begin far prior to conception. Although gestation is usually characterized in terms of waiting, a gestating woman often grapples, actively and aggressively, with the meaning and implications of giving birth. The sublime is a complex experience located where negative and positive emotions merge in a precise combination to make one’s own mental, emotional, and psychological strength particularly salient. The overall experience is usually construed as positive, but the route to this special satisfaction involves fear or frustration, even dread. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke articulates how sublime experiences combine pain and terror to offer a paradoxical source of delight: If the pain and terror are so modified as not to be actually noxious; if the pain is not carried to violence, and the terror is not conversant about the present destruction of the person, as these emotions clear the parts, whether fi ne, or gross, of a dangerous and troublesome

The Sublimity of Gestating and Giving Birth 239 incumbrance, they are capable of producing delight; not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror; which as it belongs to self-preservation is one of the strongest of all the passions. Its object is the sublime. (Burke 1998, 123) On Burke’s account, human beings can be attracted to and fascinated with contemplating elements of their own destruction. Of course, one’s actual destruction is not appreciable as sublime, but contemplation of the possibility of one’s destruction can proffer a “delightful horror,” a terror-tinged tranquility by stirring our passion for and commitment to self-preservation. Gestation can easily be understood in terms of Burke’s description of the sublime and as capable of producing a delightful horror. Note how Burke intimates a mild calming of “the strongest of all passions” through the distancing of the real object of potential harm, making it a theoretical but not a practical threat. The pain and terror involved in gestation are not frequently discussed, let alone is the possibility that a woman might intellectually dwell on the pain and terror involved. This is not surprising, given that pregnant women are most frequently represented as waiting eagerly and in joyous serenity for the ‘arrival’ of the child; they aren’t typically seen as thoughtfully preoccupied with conflicted feelings. Yet, many gestating women are extremely ambivalent and apprehensive. The most obvious and most frequently discussed fears entertained by gestating women are those of the physical pain and physical damage of birth. Throughout pregnancy there is a constant, although not always consciously attended to, awareness that eventually and inevitably the process will end in intense pain. Women know their bodies will be ravaged during birth, not to mention the toll pregnancy takes on the body. Many women are permanently scarred through giving birth; for example, physical damage to the birthing woman can include superficial to deep vaginal tearing and obstetric fistula. There also may be nagging fear as one can be aware of the real threat of infant and mother mortality. Given these facts, gestation and giving birth offer ample intercourse with danger, pain, and terror. To be considered sublime, these experiences must also allow the gestating and birthing mother to consider the meaning and value of the danger, pain, and terror involved. Perhaps not all births allow for this, but some do. In a poignant account of the birth of her son, Karen Deavor talks about the way giving birth brought her to a deeper awareness of her mental and physical strength and resiliency and into a relationship more demanding and difficult than she could have imagined: My world, too, was rocked on that snow-covered January day, the one we’ll celebrate with candles for my son. His birth accomplished a radical shift in my terrain—in my ability to copy, mentally, and in my perception of my body’s strength and resilience. It took me from my comfortable, cerebral approach to life and thrust me into my earthly,

240 Sheila Lintott primal, mortal self—a door that, once opened, continually reveals depths of light and shadow. Birth’s result, life itself, grew in me the fiercest visceral and emotional attachment possible, and with it layers of vulnerabilities and resolves I hadn’t previously touched. (Deavor 2009, 190) Here is suggested a fi rst crucial difference between masculinist conceptions of the sublime found, for example, in the work of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, and a feminist conception of the sublime. In a masculinist conception of the sublime, the reaction to danger or frustration is intellectual and focuses on the strength of the mind over the body and all that is physical. However, the sublimity experienced in the throes of labor and birth is not purely intellectual or otherwise mental. It is decidedly physical as well. Whereas for Kant the sublime affords an individual evidence of his supersensible self—the self that can transcend the threat or frustration presented to the senses, Deavor’s description tells us of an experience in which she learns more about her bodily strength and physical sensations. Inverse to a masculinist sublime, Deavor’s describes how her usual cerebral approach to life was disrupted in such a way as to disclose new truths about her body and its strength. Unlike the alleged realization that one is other than and higher than the physical world that might be achieved through sublime experiences with natural disasters, giving birth can intensify a woman’s knowledge that she is of and in the physical world and that, as such, she intimately knows an embodied power. However, dwelling on the physical pain, when that pain is days, weeks, even months off in the distance, might be a defense mechanism used by the pregnant woman. In other words, she may focus on the impending physical pain because it is easier to admit to and understand than it is to admit to and understand the threat of psychical pain and destruction that can loom persistently in the background. One reason a woman’s worry over psychical destruction is less frequently acknowledged and discussed than that of the physical pain of giving birth is that acknowledging this worry calls into question the veracity of a deep cultural mythology of motherhood. This is the mythology that insists, among other things, that all women, whether they know it or not, want to be mothers; and those who do not, should. Sigmund Freud famously understands this desire in terms of penis envy: the mother wants to have a child, preferably a male, to serve as her proxy penis in the world. Other thinkers understand this desire differently; Julia Kristeva, for example, maintains quite contrary to Freud that women want to be mothers because they crave to be united with their own mothers. Kelly Oliver summarizes Kristeva’s reversed Freudianism: “Kristeva reverses the direction of desire from mother to baby and suggests that we all want the same thing: What do we want, whether we are women or men? We all want our mommies” (Oliver 2008–10, 1). Whether we accept or reject these particular accounts is less relevant here than is the fact that

The Sublimity of Gestating and Giving Birth 241 culturally we understand the drive toward motherhood in terms that make the desire to give birth and to mother seem correct and predictable, even inevitable. Indeed, women’s desire to birth and mother is constructed as normatively universal. However, not all women want to give birth or be mothers and those who sincerely do, do not desire to be mothers entirely and exclusively. Yet it is reasonable to fear that entire and exclusive devotion to mothering is what is expected of women who birth and become mothers, regardless of whether they choose or embrace this path. Given this, during gestation a woman might fear an impending loss of self, freedom, and identity. She might feel threatened by the possibility that her unborn child will eventually, perhaps repeatedly, annihilate her. She might wonder: Who will I be after I give birth? Where will I be? How will I be? What will I be? Questions like these can plague a pregnant woman, infi ltrating her allegedly tranquil waiting period with tinges of terror. These questions can’t be adequately answered but are clearly conversant with her possible future destruction. As Adrienne Rich puts it, “pregnancy may be experienced as the extinguishing of an earlier self” (1986, 166, 167). The realization of this extinguishing of self is gradual, and if she is able to confront it, she might fi nd unearthed in her a strength and fortitude the likes of which were previously unknown to her.

GESTATION AND BIRTH: IMMENSITY AND AMBIGUITY As we have seen, the sublime is often associated with fear and pain, but in addition to the threatening and the potentially painful, an object can be considered sublime due to its size. In his Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant discusses two ways in which phenomena afford the opportunity for sublime experience: by being unfathomably strong, as in the dynamically sublime, or by being unfathomably large, as in the mathematically sublime. Whereas the dynamically sublime concerns forces for which we are no match, the mathematically sublime concerns that which “in comparison with which everything else is small” (Kant 1987, 105). An immense object need not threaten an individual with annihilation; it can threaten to overwhelm her intellectually, reducing her sense of self to that of a pathetically incompetent mind. Alternatively, for those who can embrace and explore the immensity, the result can be a feeling of thoroughgoing cognitive capaciousness and resiliency. It might seem that a pregnant body becomes large in comparison to all else insofar as the literal size of the woman’s pregnant body is markedly larger when compared with the size of her previous self. But it would be difficult to defend the claim that in sheer size, the pregnant woman is literally that which “in comparison everything else is small.” Related to the fears of personal annihilation discussed previously, a woman might sense

242 Sheila Lintott gestation’s magnitude in contemplating the life-altering nature of becoming a parent and of taking her place in a tremendous community of women past, present, and future. It is not just her literal size or shape that is at issue, but rather how she relates to her differently sized and shaped body. The size and shape at issue here are symbolic, and we should attend to what they mean and represent to her. In pregnancy, the new size and peculiar shape of her body can lead a pregnant woman to feel simultaneously alienated from and trapped within her body. While pregnant, a woman might bump into herself as one might bump into a stranger who wasn’t expected to be sharing that particular space. Iris Marion Young calls this the “doubling of the pregnant subject.” She recounts some of her own bodily experiences while pregnant: I move as if I could squeeze around chairs and through crowds as I could seven months before, only to find my way blocked by my own body sticking out in front of me—but yet not me, since I did not expect it to block my passage. As I lean over my chair to tie my shoe, I am surprised by the graze of this hard belly on my thigh. I do not anticipate my body touching itself, for my habits retain the old sense of my boundaries. In the ambiguity of bodily touch, I feel myself being touched and touching simultaneously, both on my knee and my belly. The belly is other, since I did not expect it there, but since I feel the touch upon it, it is me. (Young 2005, 50) The doubling of the pregnant subject conveys other aspects of gestation’s magnitude as well. For one, while pregnant, an entire person, a human being, once potentially and then actually, is embodied within a woman’s person. Full recognition of this embodied magnitude involves a woman recognizing she embodies not just another life, but a wholly other life: a being who will want things she does not want; will do things she would not do; will believe things she thinks are false; will hate things she loves; will love things she hates; will, in sum, be not-her, though presently, this being is her, while simultaneously being not-her. This discussion of the relationship between a pregnant woman and the being she carries also reminds us of the potential ambiguity of the sublime. Subjectively, the pregnant woman does not know where she begins and this other being begins. She feels a kick, or was it gas? How can she be sure? She knows another being is completely within her, but also that this being is more than, other than her. She knows this being depends entirely on her, but cannot be wholly identified with her. She might contemplate this relationship that seems so different from all others. Which blood is mine, which blood is this other’s? Which heartbeat echoes within, which outward? Whose body is this that I now lug around? Mine? Ours? Hers? It is not the same body I knew before, but it is the same body; isn’t it? Her inability to answer these questions can be met with an appreciation of their confounding nature and

The Sublimity of Gestating and Giving Birth 243 a deeper sense of herself as a being whose physicality is able to contain this ambiguity that the mind cannot fully comprehend. A pregnant woman’s awareness of the ambiguous nature of the division between herself and the being she gestates can confront her with a difficult realization. Initially, her awareness of ambiguity concerns herself and this one other being. However, if she can endure it, this awareness might allow her to confront the pretenses of individuality and personal autonomy that are shared myths throughout Western culture. She must recognize, that is, that she too and all others have also been gestated and birthed, that all persons began as part of this ambiguous unity with another. In The Sticky Sublime, Bill Beckley remarks how this “ambiguity may have something to do with a woman’s sense of autonomy as well as anatomy” (2001, 5). Beckley seems to suggest that a woman’s sense of autonomy is unique because her anatomy is as well: “She quite literally has the possibility to experience a new self within the physicality of her own” (2001, 5). However, this experience is not entirely unique, as the relationship between a pregnant woman and the child she gestates is the only universally shared relationship. It is the only relationship we know we have all had with at least one other person, namely, with each woman who gestated each of us. So, a gestating woman’s questioning of her pure individuality can give her reason to reconsider the myths of individuality and autonomy in all relationships. The indeterminacy between the gestating woman and the being she gestates is spatial, temporal, existential, and at times, internal to the woman and the being she gestates and births. Separation between mother and baby is indeterminable during gestation, as well as during and after birth. Any clear division seems arbitrary. For example, Beckley imagines how the ambiguity of self and other might confound a newborn: “A child is born. They cut the cord. . . . He opens his mouth. Does he think the breast part of himself, as the womb arguably was? At what point on the umbilical cord does he stop, and she begin?” (Beckley 2001, 5). In classic accounts of the sublime, we fi nd descriptions of an experience made possible by the knowledge that the frustration or threat at hand is external. Unlike the classical sublime that requires the self-other dichotomy, the sublime of which we are currently speaking allows for the possibility of wholly undermining the ground on which this dichotomy sits.

BIRTH STORIES: TERROR AND THE UNREPRESENTABLE Given the struggles and the stakes involved, labor and birth seem an obvious place to investigate the sublime. During childbirth, perhaps especially due to the rhythmic nature of labor contractions, it is possible, although admittedly challenging, for some women to appreciate the depth of the experience at hand and the significance of the pain and danger involved. Think of Edmund Burke’s conception of the sublime; he calls sublime that

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which excites danger, pain, and terror, and all of their associations with death, that “king of terrors.” If Burke is right that “whatever is qualified to cause terror is a foundation capable of the sublime,” then surely childbirth is a foundation capable of the sublime (Burke 1998, 119). The pain of labor and birth can be excruciating and both, involving the beginning of life, are closely associated with the other side of life, with death. Yet, in spite of, or perhaps because of the complex associations with pain and death, there is room for distinct pleasure, reflection, and learning in childbirth. In many cases, labor and birth are time consuming and rhythmic, affording a birthing woman the opportunity, not always a welcome one, to reflect on the experience during it. The temporal extension of labor and birth may actually invite intellectual reflection on the nature and extent of the pain. Margaret Mead captures this when she reflects on her experience of pain during the birth of her daughter: I was fascinated to discover that far from being “ten times worse than the worst pain you have ever had” (as our childless woman doctor had told us in college) or “worse than the worst cramps you ever had, but at least you get something out of it” (as my mother had said), the pains of childbirth were altogether different from the enveloping effects of other kinds of pain. These were pains one could follow with one’s mind; they were like a fi ne electric needle outlining one’s pelvis. . . . Today, preparation for natural childbirth gives women a chance to learn and to think about the task of labor, instead of simply fearing how they will endure the pains. (Mead 1972, 254) After all, the pain of giving birth is not simply something to endure because one has to; the situation is something much more than this. Some will argue that the pain of childbirth is so intense and the risks involved so real that the calm contemplation necessary for grasping the sublimity of the experience is impossible. Most writers on the sublime have insisted that the subject experiencing the sublime must be safe from the threat and removed from any real danger. Burke, for instance, locates the sublime not in pain or death, but in “fear or terror, which is an apprehension of pain or death” and argues that “when danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifi cations, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience” (Burke 1998, 119, 64). In his critical investigation of the sublime, Kant demands that the subject be adequately removed from the threat so as to able to judge the “object fearful without being afraid of it” (1987, 144). To judge the pain and risk of death in childbirth without being afraid of it may seem an impossible or highly improbable task for a woman in the throes of labor, although Mead and some other women seem able to achieve this distancing.

The Sublimity of Gestating and Giving Birth 245 We can also fi nd an aspect of sublimity, namely its unpresentability, in women’s narrative accounts of giving birth. Malcolm Andrews describes the sublime as “that which we cannot appropriate . . . if anything, it appropriates us” (Andrews 1999, 129). Birth stories likewise defy representation; women search in vain to express their stories in words, gesturing and vocalizing nonverbally to fi ll in those ineffable gaps. Yet one wonders whether birth stories are akin to other female bodily functions; that is, one wonders if they are socially, rather than metaphysically, unpresentable. It is useful to compare birth stories to feminist art that confronts an uncomfortable audience. For example, Carolyn Korsmeyer discusses an aesthetic of disgust by referring to the use of menstrual blood and genital exploration in Joanna Frueh’s performance art. In Freuh’s work, as Korsmeyer puts it, there is “something that is ‘unpresentable,’ not because of any noumenal mystery but because it ought not to be presented, being base and beneath public acknowledgment” (2004, 144). In other words, birth stories, or aspects of them, may not be about that which is literally unpresentable, but rather they may be unpresentable because they are judged to be about topics that are “base and beneath public acknowledgment.” It is not that blood, pain, and messy lived experience are always considered “base and beneath public acknowledgment” in art and public life, for too frequent are artistic depictions of battles, the crucifi xion, and other gory subject matter. This is evidence of more gendered aesthetics: the bloody struggles of men are considered worthy of representation, reflection, and honor, whereas the same of women are considered “base and beneath public acknowledgment.” Indeed, erasing this double standard is part of Freuh’s mission, and part of much feminist art’s aim: to celebrate and bring the body, the bloody, the messy lived experiences of women’s lives into the public arena. Like descriptions of menstruation, lactation, and breastfeeding, birth stories are performances that aim to present to another that which is mistakenly judged to be unworthy of inappropriate for representation. In the opening to her study of birth stories, Della Pollock writes about the fi rst birth story she ever heard. Pregnant at the time and living in a new city where she knew virtually no one, she was approached by a stranger in a grocery store. Pollock’s own maternal body invited this intimate exchange because, as she states, “my round belly and hips betrayed the fact that I would soon be the subject of similar stories” (1999, 1). A stranger simply erupted with her own birth story at the site of Pollock’s pregnant body. Pollock recounts how, “with no warning and heedless of all conventional concerns,” this stranger shared “a horrid tale of labor and delivery,” calling it a “nightmare.” The woman told her story with passion and partially conveyed it via body language. Pollock recalls the woman “gesticulating wildly over the cabbages and cucumbers,” demonstrating “exactly where the emerging fetus had broken through the vaginal wall to the bowel” (1999, 2):

246 Sheila Lintott I don’t remember many other details of her story. What I do remember—vividly, so vividly that even now my heart races at the thought— was the dramatic urgency with which she told it and my own fl ight (such as it was) to the place that was and wasn’t my home . . . to retell it to my husband and to whomever else would listen. . . . This stranger’s story became part of my body, my experience. It left me shuddering at the proximity of the birth canal and bowel—a closeness I’d simply never dared to consider. Nor had I ever considered, much less felt, that the expansion of one might rip open the other, that each tunnel might not only contract and stretch wildly but spill, break into the other, leaving the body’s excremental and reproductive functions separated by only the sheerest strip of torn skin. The woman in the grocery store was clearly still tortured by this indistinction—physically, imaginative, morally. And, as I listened to her, I accepted the burden of this unimagined and unimaginable experience and, with it, the possibility of a new kind of pleasure, a pleasure drawing me toward a place unkempt with desire, shorn of social convention, constrained only by a deeper, tacit contract that stipulated she would tell and I would listen—and bear her story to others. (Pollock 1999, 3) The fascination and fear of birth stories and their related nature as taboo, reflects the allegedly unrepresentable aspects of the sublime.

FROM THE ABJECT AND THE BEAUTIFUL TOWARD A FEMINIST SUBLIME Bearing in mind the ambiguity felt in gestation and birth, when we also focus on the negative, even gut-wrenching aspects that can constitute much of a woman’s experiences in gestation and giving birth, it makes sense to wonder whether what we are discussing here is not properly considered the sublime, but rather the abject. In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva distinguishes the sublime from the abject: “The abject permeates me, I become abject. Through sublimation, I keep it under control. The abject is edged with the sublime. It is not the same moment on the journey, but the same subject and speech bring them into being” (1982, 11). The sublime, for Kristeva, is less raw, more restrained than is the abject; in the sublime moment, we are “both here, as dejects, and there, as others sparkling” (1982, 12). The sublime allows us to fi nd meaning in difficult places, the abject breaks down all meaning and leaves us alone in difficult places. There is much of the abject in maternal experiences and in representations of them. A familiar representation is of mothers who give themselves entirely to the other, to their other, their children. These representations are, for most of us, seductive and repulsive, like a train wreck. Kristeva speaks of the maternal image that is “tied to suffering, illness, sacrifice,

The Sublimity of Gestating and Giving Birth 247 and a downfall” and tells us how “the masochistic mother who never stops working is repulsive and fascinating, abject” (1982, 158). We want to see her, judge her, emulate her, and perhaps even be loved by her. She is always other to us; she is abject to us. But this is a different sort of experience than those on which I am focusing here. My concern here is with maternal experiences from the subjective perspective of the gestating and birthing woman. Although there is room here for the abject as well, the sublime captures a woman’s struggle to understand and confront the intensity, for good and for bad, of these experiences. The abject is found in cases where and in moments when the dizzying state of confrontation and confusion is not transcended. The sublime and the abject together cover much that is harrowing and momentous in human life and so examining the sublime and the abject aspects of gestating and giving birth, as well as the interrelations thereof, can disclose more about the significance of the harrowing and momentous experiences of gestating and giving birth, including the philosophical and personal lessons that can be culled through it. The abject is one close aesthetic relative of the sublime, and the beautiful is another. Related to the rugged resolve and dogged determination thought to be required to appreciate the sublime and the tender ease and delight with which it is thought one apprehends beauty, we fi nd the deeply gendered nature of these two aesthetic phenomena. Many philosophers have spoken of the sublime as if it were purely a male phenomenon, a phenomenon to be rightly associated with paternal power and disassociated from anything feminine. Sometimes this gendering is achieved by drawing a necessary connection between being male and experiencing the sublime, as we fi nd in Kant’s precritical text, Observations of the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime. More often it happens in a seemingly inadvertent fashion as the sublime is construed as confronting us in areas of life that are—or were—exclusively or mainly reserved for men. We fi nd examples of this sort of treatment of the sublime in both Burke and Kant, who share a tendency to locate the sublime in stereotypically masculine endeavors like deep-sea fishing, war, and exploring. Not only are sublime experiences usually thought to be epitomized by stereotypically male behavior, women are usually associated with beauty. Instead of being thought fully capable of and interested in the sublime, women are expected to be beautiful and seen as being attracted to beauty, not to be intimately involved with the self-originating idea of the sublime. In his precritical texts Kant is most clear on this prejudice, as his discussion of the fading beauty of aging women in Observations shows. Even when she is said to develop her “noble and sublime qualities,” Kant sees this merely a concession for her lost beauty: Finally age, the great destroyer of beauty, threatens all those charms; and if it proceeds according to the natural order of things, gradually the sublime and noble qualities must take the place of the beautiful, in

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Sheila Lintott order to make a person always worthy of a greater respect as she ceases to be attractive. In my opinion, the whole perfection of the fair sex in the bloom of years should consist in the beautiful simplicity that has been brought to its height by a refi ned feeling toward all that is charming and noble. Gradually, as the claims upon charms diminish the reading of books and the broadening of insight could refi ll unnoticed the vacant place of the Graces with the Muses, and the husband should be the fi rst instructor. (Kant 1960, 92)

Kant’s conviction here is that women are able to experience the sublime in a limited manner and always in a way that requires male guidance; she does not defi ne and pursue for herself her own notion of the sublime. Rather, she is beautiful until she is altered by age, which alteration opens up the possibility of a broadening of insight. Along with age, pregnancy and birth likewise have the tendency to diminish a woman’s charms, if those charms are conceived of as a youthful and refi ned appearance. In this way, perhaps pregnancy and birth can afford a woman with the possibility of broadening her insight and acquiring a taste for the sublime. Such sexist associations are problematic and essentialist, obviously. Specifically, in this context, given the intensity, intelligence, and discipline that are required for and result from sublime experiences, they suggest that women are inferior to men—in interests and ability. Kant’s take on the transition away from charm through the aging process also expresses a narrow and shallow conception of a woman’s beauty, which is a beauty that I would argue ripens with age rather than diminishes. Such masculinist treatments of the sublime obscure the sublime potential of the maternal experiences of gestation and giving birth. These maternal experiences are fertile ground for the sublime, as they offer profound experiences that are occasioned by dangerous, painful, and powerful elements. The fact that these experiences are maternal illustrates the deficiencies of masculinist conceptions of the sublime and undermines all of the gendered associations with the concept. It is striking that in the masculinist conceptions of the sublime the experiences are safe: the stimulus is external and prompts introspective exploration and recognition. The sublime experiences we’ve discovered in gestation and birth are seriously dangerous experiences of internal experiences that prompt both introspective and extrospective exploration and recognition. Given the complexity and negativity of the sublime, as well as the ambivalence one might feel toward its objects, exploring gestation and birth for their sublime potential allows inquiry not only into relatively “wanted,” “chosen,” or “accepted” maternal experiences, but also to those that are defi nitely not wanted, not chosen, or not fully accepted. Thus, we have here the beginnings of an articulation of what Caroline Lundquist calls “an inclusive phenomenology of pregnancy,” one that respects the richness and diversity of maternal experiences and redresses the oversight in philosophical literature that tends to focus exclusively on positive maternal

The Sublimity of Gestating and Giving Birth 249 experiences. According to Lundquist, what is needed is “a way to characterize the ambiguous experiences and ambivalent feelings of willing maternity as a ‘normal’ part of pregnancy without simply normalizing the exquisite agonies of the unwilling mother” (2008, 140).

CONCLUSION I have chosen to explore the possibility of a feminist sublime because of the import afforded to the sublime and its gendered history. My analysis of the experiences of gestating and giving birth illustrates women’s capacity for the sublime and offers evidence that women throughout history have always had intimate knowledge of the sublime. However, the sublimity known through maternal experiences is less distanced and more visceral than is the sublimity found in examples favored by philosophers such as Burke and Kant. Their stock examples of the sublime include powerful thunderstorms, grand mountains, tumultuous seas, and the massiveness of space; in these examples, the stimulus that prompts an experience of the sublime is in a more clear sense external to the agent. Despite this divide between the stimulus and the appreciator, thinkers such as Kant have insisted that the sublime is truly found in the appreciator. Moreover, the sublime has some commonalities with the abject; however, unlike with the abject, the sublime experience is one in which a person finds a thread of meaning that holds personal significance for him or her. A feminist sublime explains how some women might find such a thread to follow during gestation and birth. It is also remarkable that with this conception of a feminist sublime we fully achieve a collapse between stimulus and appreciator; in fact, the maternal examples of the sublime in gestation and birth take the collapse of the dichotomy of subject and object as a starting point. The feminist sublime is embodied and decidedly not abstract. It does not enjoy the safety or the “disinterestedness” demanded by more traditional conceptions of the sublime. Thus, not only does my analysis show that we need to rethink the gendered aspects of the sublime in light of maternal experiences, it also suggests that in light of maternal experiences, we see the need for new versions of the sublime that effectively problematizes many implicit and explicit distinctions of classical conceptions of the sublime, including, most pointedly, the gender hierarchy it assumes and endorses.

NOTES 1. For extensive analyses and critiques of the gendered nature of the sublime, as well as for rich conceptions of a feminist sublime, see: Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (New York: Routledge, 2007); Battersby, “Stages on Kant’s Way: Aesthetics, Morality, and the Gendered Sublime” in Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics, edited by Peggy Zeglin Brand Carolyn Korsmeyer (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania

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Sheila Lintott State University Press, 1995); Timothy Gould, “Intensity and Its Audiences: Toward a Feminist Perspective on the Kantian Sublime” in Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics; and Bonnie Mann, Women’s Liberation and the Sublime (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

WORKS CITED Andrews, Malcolm. 1999. Landscape and Western Art. New York: Oxford University Press. Beckley, Bill. 2001. Sticky Sublime. New York: Allworth Press. Burke, Edmund. 1998. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. New York: Oxford University Press. Deavor, Karen. 2009. “Shifts of Light.” In Labor Pains and Birth Stories, ed. Jessica Powers, 190–94. San Bruno, CA: Catalyst. Kant, Immanuel. 1960. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. Trans. John T. Goldthwait. Berkeley: University of California Press. . 1987. Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. 2004. Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction. New York: Routledge. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror” An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Lundquist, Caroline. 2008. “Being Torn: Toward a Phenomenology of Unwanted Pregnancy.” Hypatia 23.3: 136–55. Mead, Margaret. 1972. Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years. New York: William Morrow. Oliver, Kelly. 2008–10. “Julia Kristeva’s Maternal Passions.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 18.1: 1–8. Pollock, Della. 1999. Telling Bodies, Performing Birth. New York: Columbia University Press. Rich, Adrienne. 1986. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. 10th anniversary edition. New York: W. W. Norton. Ruddick, Sara. 1994. “Thinking Mothers/Conceiving Birth.” In Representations of Motherhood, ed. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Young, Iris Marion. 2005. “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation.” In On Female BodyExperience. New York: Oxford University Press.

Contributors

EDITORS Sheila Lintott is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bucknell University with research interests in feminist philosophy, philosophical aesthetics, and environmental philosophy. Her work appears in journals such as Hypatia, Environmental Ethics, and The British Journal of Aesthetics. She also edited Motherhood: Philosophy for Everyone—The Birth of Wisdom (Blackwell). Maureen Sander-Staudt is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Southwest Minnesota State University, where she teaches feminist ethics, moral theory, and logic. She specializes in feminist ethics of care, and has published on the topics such as care ethics and virtue ethics, artificial womb technology, the moral status of embryos, and the political agency of care-givers. Her ongoing interests are in the areas of reproductive technology, care as a political practice, and family ethics. She is currently working on projects that explore the ethics of polygamy, and human genetic patents. She has recently co-edited Applying Care Ethics to Business with Maurice Hamington, forthcoming from Springer Press, and is working on a manuscript examining reciprocity as a political concept within an ethic of care.

CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS Jennifer Benson earned her Ph.D. at Michigan State University and is now an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Washington College, Chestertown, Maryland. Her research interests center on radical and post-colonial feminist theory, especially conceptions of freedom. Tabitha Bernard is an M.A. student in the Women and Gender Studies program at Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Currently she is writing her Master’s thesis on the Ethical and Social Policy

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Implications of Planned Unassisted Childbirth. For the last several years, she has worked in Ottawa, Ontario, as a birth and postpartum doula, and a childbirth educator. Peg Brand is an artist () and Associate Professor at Indiana University Purdue University—Indianapolis. Her research is on feminist explorations into philosophical aesthetics, particularly the topic of beauty. She has co-edited Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics (with Carolyn Korsmeyer), Hypatia’s Special Issue on “Women, Art, and Aesthetics” (with Mary Devereaux), and edited Beauty Matters for Indiana University Press. She is a contributor to 100,000 Years of Beauty published by Editions-Babylone, Paris, and to The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy edited by Linda Martin Alcoff and Eva Feder Kittay. Forthcoming in 2012, also from Indiana University Press, is Beauty Revisited. Sally Fischer is a professor in the Philosophy Department of Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. Her current research involves developing an embodied, existential ethics elicited from the works of Merleau-Ponty, Irigaray, Marcel, and Nietzsche. Her articles on Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray have appeared in the journal, International Studies in Philosophy, in Merleau-Ponty and Ecology: Dwelling on the Landscapes of Thought (State University of New York Press, 2007), and in Intertwinings: Interdisciplinary Encounters with Merleau-Ponty (SUNY Press, 2008). She is currently working on a book manuscript on Marcel, Irigaray, and Merleau-Ponty. Paula Granger is a graduate of Indiana University, Purdue University of Indianapolis, fi nishing with a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and an Individualized degree in Women and Religion. Her interests in art, female iconography and symbolism led to research projects in both Mexico and Poland where she was able to examine Christianity’s prominent female figure, Mary the mother of Jesus, through the lens of culture while attempting to understand the meaning of this figure to the people. Granger worked as an Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department Family Violence Outreach Advocate, helping victims of domestic violence. Currently she is in the U.S. Army Intelligence Division with intentions to continue graduate school in a field that merges her passion for women’s empowerment, art, and international studies and that will allow her to reach her goal of becoming a U.S. diplomat. Sherri Irvin is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma. She received her BA from the University of Arizona and her PhD from Princeton University. Her research interests center on the philosophy of contemporary art, the relation between aesthetics and ethics, and the aesthetics of everyday experience. She is Aesthetics and

Contributors 253 Philosophy of Art editor of Philosophy Compass and has published articles in the British Journal of Aesthetics, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Museum Management and Curatorship, and several anthologies. Christine A. James is a Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Valdosta State University. Her research is on philosophy of science, bioethics, social and political philosophy, cultural critique, and the intersections between these fields. She has published journal articles in The Journal for Philosophical Practice, The Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, The International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, Essays in Philosophy, The Southwest Philosophy Review, The Journal of Consciousness Studies, and Biosemiotics. She also maintains an active conference presentation schedule, and has presented her current research at conferences throughout the US, Canada, Austria, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Jean Keller is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University. Co-editor of Feminist Interventions in Ethics and Politics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005) with Barbara Andrew and Lisa Schwartzman, she has published articles on Habermas and friendship, care ethics and the family, relational autonomy, feminist pedagogy, and motherhood. Maeve O’Donovan is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame of Maryland University. Her research interests include contemporary continental philosophy, feminist philosophy, philosophy of disability, and the intersection of these with philosophy of mind. She has published articles in The Journal of Critical Studies in Business and Society and The Journal of Academic Ethics. Christine Overall is a Professor of Philosophy and University Research Chair at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. Her research is in feminist philosophy, applied ethics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of education. She is the editor or co-editor of three books and the author of five. The most recent of her books, Aging, Death, and Human Longevity: A Philosophical Inquiry (University of California Press), won the Canadian Philosophical Association’s 2005 Book Prize. Her next book, entitled, Why Have Children? The Ethical Debate, will be published by MIT Press in 2012. Julie Piering is the Richard Wood Professor for the Teaching of Philosophy at Northern Arizona University. Her primary areas of research are in Ancient and Contemporary Continental Thought, especially as they relate to Ethics and Feminist Philosophy. In addition to several book

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chapters and encyclopedia entries, she has published articles in such journals as International Studies in Philosophy and the International Philosophical Quarterly. Brooke Schueneman is an instructor of Women’s Studies and a Ph.D student of Philosophy at the University of Georgia. Her research interests include philosophy of emotion, philosophical psychology, and feminist philosophy, each as understood through contemporary, ancient, and non-Western philosophy. She holds an M.A. in Philosophy As a Way of Life from the University of Liverpool. Brooke is also the mother of three. Joshua Shaw is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College. His research is on twentieth-century European philosophy, philosophical aesthetics, and normative ethics. He is the author of Emmanuel Levinas on the Priority of Ethics: Putting Ethics First (Cambria Press, 2008). Joshua has published pieces in Hypatia, Film-Philosophy, and Philosophy Compass. He is currently working on a book-length manuscript on ethical dilemmas raised by family and family relationships. Lissa Skitolsky is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Susquehanna University. Her research in the fields of Continental philosophy, political science and genocide studies aims to interrogate our cultural and political responses to mass violence. She has published journal articles and book reviews in International Studies in Philosophy, Lessons and Legacies, and Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. Most recently she published a book chapter entitled “Finding Man in der Muselmann: The Use and Abuse of the ‘Walking Dead,’” in the volume Metacide by Rodopi Editions (2010). Alison Stone is Reader in European Philosophy at Lancaster University, UK. Her research is on feminist philosophy, especially Irigaray, French feminism, and theories of sexual difference; on German Romanticism and German Idealism, including Hegel; and on Marxism and the Frankfurt School. She is the author of Petrified Intelligence: Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2004), Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy (Polity Press, 2007). Alison has published journal articles in Hypatia, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Continental Philosophy Review, Inquiry, and the Journal of Moral Philosophy, amongst others, and is the author of various book chapters. Beckey Sukovaty is a Seattle-based certified mediator, adjunct faculty member at Portland State University’s Confl ict Resolution Program,

Contributors 255 and Ph.D. student in Human Development at Fielding Graduate University. She holds a Master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Oregon. Allison Wolf, Ph.D. is currently an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa. Dr. Wolf earned both her M.A. and doctoral degrees from Michigan State University and her B.A. from Brandeis University. Dr. Wolf has published articles in the areas of health care ethics, and is currenty working on a book focusing on ethical issues in childbirth. In addition to her interest in health care ethics, Dr. Wolf conducts research in the area of global justice within the context of U.S.-Central American relations. She has published “Can Global Justice Provide a Path Toward Achieving Justice Across the Americas,” in The Journal of Global Ethics and continues to investigate questions of ethics of development and historical restorative justice in Costa Rica and Nicaragua.

Index

20/20, 112 40 Year Old Virgin, 232 48 Hours, 112

A Abject, 238; compared to the sublime, 246; in maternal experience, 246–47; patriarchal aspects, 238, 246 Ableism, 96 Abortion, 118 Abraham and Isaac, 138 Abstraction, abstract theory, 153, 157 Action, see Power Adamee, Christine, 102 ADHD, 11, 96–97, 100–2; boys and girls, 98; children, 101; medication, 98; men, 98; mothering with, 97–100, racial minorities, 101; sexism, 97; social-economic factors, 99, Adoption, 7, 21–33; Asian, 26; African, 26; birth language, 27; birth parents, 27; China, 24; families with children from China, 27; Latino, 26; self-Identity, 26; Kamp Kimchee, 27; kinning, 23–25; Korean, 21; 28; racism, 22; racial-ethnic identity, 25–30, 36; transracial, 22, 27 Aesthetics, 15–16, 215–36, 237–50; childbirth, disgust, 79–87; of maternal experience, 238 Affect, 127 Agnotology, 97, 100 Aid to Families with Dependent Children, 121n3 Alcohol consumption, 183, 188n17, n20

Ambiguity, 154–56, 160 American Commission on Maternal Welfare, 233 American Medical Association, 208 American National Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign, 56 Americans with Disabilities Act, 118, 211n2 Andrews, Malcolm, 245 Apatow, Judd, 232 Aristotle, 3, 139, 189n24, 191, 223–24 Art, artisans, 215, female, 215; historical depictions of childbirth in, 220 Assymetry, asymmetrical. See interdependence Athens, Agnodice, 223 Attention Deficit Disorder. See ADHD Autonomy, 25; as based on anatomy, 243 Azfar, Pashtoon, 234n23 Aztec, goddess Tlazolteol, 215

B Baby Formula, 50, 198; ear infections, 51; obesity in children, 51; Babies, 34, 225; agency, 134; bodily intentions, 196; deformed, 222; and disgust, 79–87; and gender, 127; in psycho-analytical relations, 127; and wet-nurses, 225; and working mothers, 199 Badinter, Elisabeth, 55 Bailey, Alison, 26 Bailey, Lucy, 15 Ball, Lucille, 233 Baraitser, Lisa, 126 Bartky, Sandra, 37 Basow, Susan, et. al, 26 Battersby, Christine, 249n1

258 Index Beardsworth, Sara, 135 Beauty, and Kant, 247; and women, 247 Beautiful, 238, 246 Beauvoir, Simone de, 13, 151, 155, 160, 230 Becker, Lawrence, 172, 175 Beckley, Bill, 243 Being-toward-death, 166 Benson, Jennifer, 8; 34–48 Bernadin, Cardinal Joseph, 115 Bernard, Tabitha, 9; 49–63 Bernstein, Anne, 151, 156, 157, 160 Bettelheim, Bruno, 153, 161 Betterton, Rosemary, 189n21, 185 Bigwood,Carol, 200 Bing, Elizabeth, 233 Birrel, Jean, 107 Birth, 35, 143, 194; absence of men at, 221; aesthetics of, 215–36; anxiety about body, 168; artistic representations of, 215; as base, 245; as capable of being sublime, 244; at home, 226; birth-giver, 166; cesarean sections, 40; child and mother, 167; classes, 34; crowning in, 216, 218; and deeper awareness, 239; desire as universal, 241; education, 34; depictions of women in act of, 215;experience of, 215; fear of body, 216; giving, 237; historical information about, 220; intolerance for images of pain, 216; lack of information about, 168; life altering, 242; love, 143; manuals, 34; medicalization of, 226; and pain, 244; phenomenology of, 167; reasons for censure of visual perception, 216; subjective experience of, 238; suspicion and distrust of female power in, 216; stories about, 245–46; as transformation, 237; trays, 225; unclear boundaries, 196; as universal phenomenon, 237, 243; visually sanitized, 220; as visually taboo, 215, 220; vulnerability in, 143, 146 Birth of a Baby, 233 Birth Project, Judy Chicago, 215, 226 Birthing, scarcity of images, 219 Birthing stools, 225 Blindness, mothering with, 95; 102

Bloom, Harold, 139 Blum, Barbara, 171 Blum, Linda, 66, 97 Bodies, dualism, 186; female, 126, 180; feeble-minded, 183; as public in pregnancy, 178–90. See embodiment Body, anxiety about in pregnancy, 168; changes in pregnancy, 167; fragility, 171; in pregnancy, 242 Body-objects, 197 Body-subjects, 196 Boldo, Christiane, 119 Bombeck, Erma, 107; “Mothers of Disabled Children”, 113 Books, on pregnancy, 35 Bordo, Susan, 188n9, 191 Bovine, becoming in pregnancy, 191–214 Brain in vat, 141, 145 Brand, Peg, 16, 215–236, 249n1 Breasts, abscess, 41 Breastfeed, Breastfeeding, 9, 36, 64, 148–49, 178; abscesses, 41; advocates, 56; American history, 74; Australia, 73; baby formula, 76; bodily vulnerability; 57; cancer, 51; class, 57; cross-nursing, 65; as dialogical art, 196; disgust at, 86–87; dilemmas for mothers, 65–66, 77; disrupting dilemmas, 74; embarrassment, 53; Facebook, 75–76; feminist concerns, 55; feminist scholarship, 64, 67; good for women, 51; guilt, 55–56; harassment to mothers, 85, 88n15, n16; harms to women, 52; HIV, 52; homosexual families, 72; individualism, 72, 77; infections, 68; Lactivism, 75; learning about, 168, 197; Levinas, 64; liberty, 49; mastitis, 41; men, 54; milk banks, 65; moral responsibility to, 49–60, mothering, 49; minimizing pain, 69; mitigating factors to a moral responsibility, 52–54; needs of mothers, 208; New Zealand, 72; Norway, 76; pain in, 64–69, 69; 77; public, 53, 148; pressure on women to, 55; privilege, 71; repulsion to, 53; sexuality and, 53–54, 85, 88n15; social and political contexts, 58, 65;

Index surveillance, 49; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 64; workplace lack of accommodation, 200 Breast Milk, as commodity, 75; as gift, 74; availability, 67, 74, 76; economic value, 76; expense, 75; new mothers, 76; pay for, 76 Brothers Grimm, 151, 161 Brown, Dan, 109 Buck v. Bell, 183 Buck, Carrie, 183–184 Burke, Edmund, 17, 238, 240, 243–44, 249 Butler, Judith, 211n5 Buzzanelli, Patrice, 104n2 Byrthe of Mankinde, Rӧsslin, Dr. Eucharis, 225

C Caddell, Ian, 232 Callo, Tiffany, 93 Cancer, and breastfeeding, 51 Capla, Kestling Fine Art, 218 Capla, Lincoln, 218 Care, and community, 178; and motherhood, 6 Care Ethics, 152, 193–94; alternative models needed, 151–52; and caring practices, 152–53, 155–59; as dependent on birth mothers, 152, 157–58; international relations, 158; and irresponsibility, 155; as moral theory, 152; reliance and overreliance of Good Mother, 151, 153; and responsibility, response-ability, 152, 155–56, 158–59; Step-mothering as a model for, 151–53, 155–59 Care giver(s), as gender neutral, 207; in need of support, 211 Care work, 99 Carlson, Licia, 96, 104n2 Catholic Worker houses, 121n4 Cesarean Sections, 40, 225 Chamberlen family, 225 Chestnut, Mary Boykin, 108 Chicago, Judy, 16, 215, 217, 219, 226, 228, Birth Tear, 216; Birth Trinity, 229, The Crowning, 229; Dinner Party, 229; Earth Birth, 229 Child, deliverance of, 216; as gender neutral, 126–27; in defi nition of

259

“maternal”, 126; in life/death cycle, 175; fi rst born, 175; quick growth of, 175 Child Protective Services, and mothering with disabilities, 95 Child Abuse, in Catholic Church, 116 Childbirth. See birth Children, as carers, 94; as differently sexed, 127; disability, 94; disgust, 79–87; as gender neutral, 126–27 Chodorow, Nancy, 12, 130; Christ, Jesus, 107; child, 215; victim soul, 109; 121n4 Christianity, 3, 109, 138, 224; church leadership, 108; marginalized peoples, 114; people with disabilities in, 114; philsophers, 3; sexual abuse in, 116; suffering in, 109–10; women’s leadership in, 116 Civil War, 108 Class, and judgment of pregnant women, 180–81 Cogito, 192 Cognitive impairment, and sainthood, 110 Cohen, Richard, 166 Community, 179; and bodies, 186; as critical of pregnant women, 181–82, 189n25; as generous to pregnant women, 180; inter-net, 187n2 Confinement rooms, in Renaissance, 224 Confucianism, 3 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, 118 Corkee, Marian, 104n1 Critchley, Simon, 176n7 Critical Race Theory, 101 Cross Nursing, 70–73 Culture(s), 203, 215; Western, 215, 243

D Danilecka, Lilla, 118 Daughters, 126–137; ambivalence toward mothers, 126; maternal ambivalence toward, 127; and mothers, 126–37; and psychoanalytic feminism, 126–37, variables in maternal relations, 127 Day care, 206, 209 Death, 165, 166; as source of all passion, 166; in cycle of life, 171;

260 Index end of suffering, 172; fear of as irrational, 172–73; fear of in pregnancy, 170; harms of, 174; of individuality, 174–75; learning to die, 165–77; and logic, 174 Deavor, Karen, 239 Declereq, Eugene, 234 Deizen, Norman, 121n3 Dell’Sacra, Isola, 223 Dependency, 128 Derrida, Jacques, 149n4 Des Pres, Terrence, 85 DesCartes, Rene, 139, 145, 191, 195 Desire, 127 Deutsche, Helene, 12, 129 Devereaux, Mary, 142 Di Stefano, Christine, 160n1 Diapering, 82 Diotima, 139, 144 Disability, 93–106; accommodation of, 201–2; advantages of mothering with, 102; blindness, 95, 102, cognitive, 96, 110; learning, 97; literature, 94, 96; networks, lack of, 95; and post-modernism, 107–19; and sainthood, 107–19; social and economic obstacles to mothering with, 95–106; visibility bias, 96 Disability Studies, 94, 97, 101–2 Disgust, 79–87; breast-milk, 82, 86, 88n6; breastfeeding, 84–85; Down’s Syndrome, 102; and degradation, 84; directed at persons, 84; footnote 6; cognition, 82; function in motherhood, 80; illness, 81, 82; maternal love and negation of, 79; mothers, 80; mothers and fathers, 82; and obscenity, 88n15; overcoming, 82; and pleasure, 83; and risk, 83; and social control, 83; and social judgment, 86–87; suspension of, 82; temperament, 82, 83 Division of labor, 127; and gender, 127 Doctors, 226–27 Double-bind, and post-partum women, 8, 36, 44 Doubling, 242 Down’s Syndrome, 102 Dualism, 6, 145

E Economics, 199

Edelglass, William, 65 Edwards, Daniel, 217 Egyptians, and birthing techniques, 220, 222; depictions of birth, 220–21; goddesses, 220 Eichenbaum, Luise, 132 Elias, Norbert, 84 Eliot, Norbert, 84 Embodiment, 6, 145, 146; changes in pregnancy, 167–68; duality, 186; fragility, 171; maternal, 200, 211; perspective in pregnancy, 180; and sublime, 249 Empathy, 131; for pregnant women, 167 Ensler, Eve, 219 Epicureans, 166, 175 Epicurus, 173 Epistemology, 97, 192; ignorance, 100 Epstein, Randi, 225, 228 Equality, as connection based, 153; as individual based, 153 Essentialism, 6, 152, 203, 248 Ethics of Care. See Care Ethics European Union, 209

F Fairy Tales. See Myth Family leave, 194, 207 Family, 23, 187n1; biological, 23; dysfunctional, 157; identity, 25, 27; nuclear, 154; stepfamily, 156–57 Family Medical Emergency Leave Act, 205, 208 Fantasy, 127. See myth Fathers, 12–13, 141, 143, 152, 154–55; biological, 157–58. See also mother Fatherhood, 86–87; and philosophy, 138; as episodic, 146; and realism, 175 Fear, 238, of death as irrational, 172–73; learning to die, 172 Feeble-mindedness, 96, 101, 183 Feminine, identity, 216 Femininity, as underside, 203 Feminism, 142 Feminist Care Ethic. See Care Ethic Feminist Standpoint, 10 Feminist Theory, 10, 93, 152–55, and disability, 93, psycho-analytical, 126–37 Femininity, as presumed inferior to masculinity, 145

Index Fetuses, rights of, 118, 184; and visibility due to technology, 189n23 Finland, 209 Fioenza, Elisabeth Schussler, 120n2 Firestone, Shulamith, 4 Fischer, Sally, 15, 191–214 Fitzmaurice, Susan, 102 Flax, Jane, 12, 132, 136 Forceps, 225; hands of flesh/hands of iron, 226 Formula. See Baby Formula Foster parent. See parent Foucault, Michael, 120n2 Fourth tri-mester, 34–48 Fox, Faulkner, 186 France, 209 Freud, Sigmund, 12, 128, 228, 240 Free-birthers, 228 Fricker, Miranda, 102 Frohlich, Mary, 121n5 Frueh, Joanna, 245 Frye, Marilyn, 36

G Gender, and division of labor, 127; male identity, 134 Genital exploration, 245 George, Robert, 119 Gestating, 237–38, as without distinct temporal barriers, 238 Gestures, 193, between mother and baby, 193 Giles, Fiona, 65–66, 76 Gilligan, Carol, 4 Giloteaux, Paulin, 109 Ginsberg, Ruth Bader, 207 God, 107, 121n3 Goddesses, Egyptian, 220; fertility, 220 Golden, Janet, 74 Good Mother. See mother Goodrich, Thelma Jean, 152 Gospel of John, 121n3 Grady, Denise, 231 Granger, Paula, 16, 215–36 Gross, Elizabeth, 203 Gynaecology, 222 Gynecology and Obstetrics, 40 Gynecological, manuals, 17th century, 226

H Hadot, Pierre, 166 Haglan, Mark, 27

261

Hamington, Maurice, 193, 210–12, 214n8 Hammer, Leslie, 206 Hathor, Egyptian goddess, 220; temple of, 220 Hausman, Bernice, 66 Hayak, Selma, 9, 70 Hayes, Jeanne, 104n3 Head Start Programs, 206 Health, families, 193; mothers and babies, 200; sex and reproduction, 118; workplace laws, 193 Hegel, George Wilheim, 213n6 Heidegger, Martin, 14, 167 Held, Virginia, 151–53, 161 Hellenistic, art, 220–21; philosophers, 165, 172 Henry Ford Hospital, 228 Hesiod, 223–24 Heteronormativity, 8, 159 “Hidden Mothers” phenomenon, 1–2 HIV, and breastfeeding, 52 Hippocrates, 221–22, 224; Gynaecology, 222 Holmes, Justice Oliver Wendell, 183 Homosexuality, and breastfeeding, 72 Horney, Karen, 128 Howell, Signe, 23 Hughes, Christina, 153, 161 Human Milk Bank Association of North America, 75 Husserl, Edmund, 196 Hybrid Being. See stepmother Hyginus, 223 Hysteria, “as wandering of womb”, 222

I Ideal, Idealization. See myth Identity, family, 23–25 Imaginative projection in philosophy, 148 Incest, 118 Independence, 145. See interdependence Individual, individualism. See self Infants. See babies Innate. See nature Instinct. See nature Intercorporeality, 193 Interdependence, Interdependency, 153–54, 157–59; asymmetry, 158–59; dependence, 153–54, 158; inter-relational, 153 Internet, 187n2; 219 Inter-relational. See interdependence

262

Index

Intersectionality, 128; Maternal relations to children, 127–128 Intimacy, 81; and disgust, 81 Irigaray, Luce, 192–3, 202, 204, 207, 210–11, 213n6, n7 Irvin, Sherri, 10, 79–87

J James, Christine, 11, 107–125 Jesus Christ. See Christ John, Gospel of. See Gospel of John Joy, 155, 159 Judaeus, Philo, 174 Justice, as equality, 153, 157

K Kahlo, Frida, 228; My Birth, 228 Kane, Paula, 121n4 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 191, 240–41, 244; and beauty, 248; and sublime, 247, 249 Kaplan, Bonnie, 98 Keane, Robert, 110 Keller, Jean, 7, 21–33 Kelly, Mary, 88n4 Kierkegaard, Søren, 138 Kim, Eleana, 28 Kinning, adoption, 7, 23–24 Kittay, Eve Feder, 13, 104n2, 139, 153–54, 158, 161 Klein, Melanie, 133 Knocked Up, 232 Korean, adoption, 21, 28 Korsmeyer, Carolyn, 88n10, 245, 249n1 Kristeva, Julia, 185, 240, 246–47 Kukla, Rebecca, 50, 55–56, 219, 222–28 Kwasnia, Emma, 75

L Labor, 243 Lactation. See Breastfeeding Lactivism, 75 Lamaze, 228, 233 Lawrence, Jane, 189n22 Le Leche League, 68, 76 Learning to die, 165–77 Lederman, Regina, 169 Leifer, Myra, 167 Lesbian, mothers, 159 Levinas, Emmanuel, 140–44, 185; paternity, 141; “useless suffering” and Breastfeeding, 64 Liberation, liberatory action. See power

Life, cycle of, 175; pleasure in, 173 Living in present, 175 Lindemann, Kate, 96 Lintott, Sheila, 16, 237–50 Litt, Jacquelyn, 99 Little Audrey Santo Foundation, 110–11 Lloyd, Genevieve, 100 Locke, John, 192, 205 Love, loving, 152, 160; loving perception 155–57; romanticized, 152, 156–57, 160; self-sacrificial, 152–53 Lucretius, 172 Lugones, Maria, 13, 155–57, 159, 160n2, 161 Lundquist, Caroline, 248 Lyerly, Anne Drapkin, 184

M Madonna. See Virgin Mary Madam Tussaud, 218 Mahler, Margaret, 134 Mahowald, Mary Briody, 104n3 Maier, Corinne, 56 Malacrida, Claudia, 94 Male Gender Identity, 134 Mann, Bonnie, 249n1 Manninen, Bertha Alvarez, 187n7 Maushart, Susan, 68 Martyrs, 121n3 Mary Magdalene, 108 Masculinity, as valuable, 135; as presumed superior to feminity, 145 Mastitis, 41 Maternal, definition, 126; feeling, 130; impact on daughters, 127; instinct, 155; making stories accessible to men, 149; virtues, 130 Maternal Practice, 22–23 Maternal Thinking, 21, 31, 139, 143 Maternity, and philosophy, 138 Maternity Leave, 194, 209; policies, 209; in Europe, 209 Mayeski, Marie Anne, 109 McGary, Elizabeth, 88n6 McGuire, Jacqueline, 127, 132 McManus, Bishop Robert J., 110 Mead, Margaret, 244 Meditations, 145 Memory, 127 Men, 36; as dominant in in art, medicine, and philosophy, 220; excluded from female spaces, 148–49

Index Menstrual blood, 245 Menstruation, 168 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 15, 72, 192–96, 200, 202, 204, 210–11, 213n7; and bodily intelligibility, 192–93 Merry Foundation, 111 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 221 Midwives, 221; Agnodice, 223; Afghan, 231, artists as metaphorical, 216; as historically less capable of male doctors, 223, 225–26; decline of, 226; representations of, 223–24 Mind/Body Dualism, 145 Milk Banks, 65, 74, 75 Miller, William Ian, 82 Mintz, Susanna, 94, 102 Miracles, 110, 114 Miscarriage, 180 Montaigne, Michel de, 166, 173 Morning Sickness, 180, 188n11 Mother-Blame, 94 Mother-daughter relations, as compared to sons, 123; Helene Deutsche, 129; as pathological, 127; as valuable, 128 Mothering, daughter and sons, 126–137; practice, 152 Mothers, 34; abuse of, 50; advice to, 184, 188n14; age, 182; antiessentialism, 152; as becoming, 167; “bad”, 151, 155, 160, 180; biological or birth-mothers, 151–52, 154, 156–58; 159; breastfeeding, 36, 148; caregiver, 152–57, 157–58; as changing, 167; class and social judgment, 180; of daughters, 126–37; as distributed, 153–54; defined, definition of, 5, 80, 152, 160n, 167; of disabled children, 110, 113, 154; and disgust, 85; embodied needs, 199; empathy for, 167; feeble-minded, 183; feelings toward daughters and sons, 126; idealization of, 132; lesbian, 159, lived experiences of, 126; “good”, 94, 151, 153–54, 159–60; good enough, 153; as practice, 153, 159; as process, 175; of philosophers, 3; relation to own mothers, 126; as shared practice, 153–54, 158;

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sterilization, 183; stories, 12–13, 149; too young, 182; unmarried, 159; virtues, 130 Motherhood, anti-essentialism, 127; breastfeeding, 64–78; blindness, 95; corporeal aspects, 136; cultural ideals, 94; defined, 5; disabilities, with, 10, 93–106; 154; disgust, 10, 79–87; distributed, see mothering, definition of, 5, 80, 152, 160n; doubts about, 95; empathy in, 174; fatherhood, 86–87; first months of, 193; idealization, 132; idealized, 151; imaginative empathy for, 139–40; lesbian, 159; male reluctance to reflect upon, 140; as natural, 152, 159; and paid work, 198; patience and disability, 107; phenomenology, 191; and professional philosophy, 4; realism, 175; sensuousness, 136; sexism, 97; single, 159; Socrates, 139; step-mothers, 151–61 Middle Ages, 225 Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure, 26 Mullin, Amy, 167 Murphy, Father Lawrence C., 116 Musacchio, Jacqueline, 225 My Birth, Kahlo Frida, 228 Myth, Brothers Grimm, 151, 161; Cinderella, 151, 160; fairy tale, 152, 157, 160; fantasy, 151, 154; as ideal, 151–55, 158; perfection, 151, 153, 155; romantic, 151, 153, 159; traditional, 151–59

N Nadeau, Kathleen, 97 Nagel, Thomas, 145 Naomi, and Ruth, 70 Nassaince, 233 Nation, 187n1 Nature, natural, 152–9 Neal, Margaret, 206, 214n8 Newman, Tony, 94 Nichomachean Ethics, 139 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 121n5, 171, 185, 197, 202 Nihilism, 121n6 Nilsson, Lennart, 189n23 Noddings, Nel, 4, 152, 161

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Index

Nuclear Family 154, 157. See family Nudity, 218 Nussbaum, Martha, 88n6; 119

O Obstetrics, manuals, 17th century, 226 O’Donovan, Maeve, 10, 93–106 Oedipus complex, 128; periods of 135, pre-Oedipus stage, 135–36 Oedipal relations, 139 Oliver, Kelly, 240 Ontology, 192; of flesh, 195 Operah, 22 Oppression, 36–38, 50; psychological, 37–38, 44. See power Orbach, Susie, 132 Overall, Christine, 9, 49–63

P Paid labor, and confl ict with motherhood, 198 Pain, 238 Palmer, Gabrielle, 52, 71 Parents, adoptive/birth, 25; foster, 152; good, 50 Parental Leave, 209 Parenting, 152 Parker, Roszika, 127, 133; partiality, 157–58 Passion, 224 Paternal Figures, 128 Paternity, 142; Leave, 209; qualities, 135 Patriarchy, 145; and culture, 126 Penis Envy, manifestation in motherhood, 128 Perfection. See myth Perkins-Gilman, Charlotte, 4 Perpetua, 121n3 Phenomenology, 15, 191, and motherhood, 191; of pregnancy, 167, 246 Philosophy, 1, 34; disembodied, 192; fathers, 138; feminist theory, 152–53, 155; genderbiased, 192; imagination in, 141–43, 148; lack of women in, 140, 192, 203; mothers stories, 138–49; motherhood, 2, 144–45, 148; pregnancy, 34–41; sexism in, 145; subjective experiences of mothers in, 2; thought experiments in, 145; Western, 138

Philosophers, and fathers, 138; Hellenistic, 165, 172; imagination, 141–43, motherhood, 144–45, 148; mothers stories, 138–49; Stoics, 166 Phinney, J., 26 Physicians. See doctors Piering, Julie, 14, 178–190 Plato, 3, 139, 142, 144, 165, 171, 222–24; Symposium, 139, 144; theory of insatiable womb, 227 Playfulness, 155–6, 159 Pleasure, 166 Political policy change, 195, 204–5 Politics, political, 153, 155–59 Pollack, Della, 245 Pope John Paul II, 115 Post-modernism, 11, 108–10, 119, 121n3 Post-partum, depression, 51; pregnancy, 34–48; literature, 34–48; silences in, 35 Power, 151; power relations, 156; liberation, 156, 160; oppression, 151, 155; as privilege, 155 Pregnancy, 139, 167; alcohol consumption in, 183, 188n17, n20; approval of others in, 168; awareness of death, 171; as barrier to philosophy, 171; body as community, 179–80; body as foreign, 185; bodies, 34; class and social judgment, 180; climatic end to, 219; as collectivity, 178; crisis in, 171; depicted as painless, 221; doctors in, 231; doubling in, 170; embodied perspective, 180; as embodying the human cycle, 175; empathy in, 174; eroticization of, 188n16; familial model, 179; fi rst child, 170; freedom from guilt, 169; growth amidst decay, 175; as ineffable, 139–40, 146; as instrumental, 184; lay-literature, 8, 34–48; miscarriage, 180; mistaken perception of, 182; as nation building, 185; in North America, 179; as obviously manifest, 167; opaqueness and transparency, 179; paradigm shift in, 169; phenomenology, 167, 248; physical sensations of, 185; post-partum, 34–48;

Index problems with, 40; public scrutiny of, 182, 187; and a sense of adulthood, 169; sexuality, 41, 43; shame, 181–82; smoking, 182; Socrates, 139; spiritual, 171; stories about, 246; technology in, 179; touch, 178; transitional, 171; turn inward, 170; and universal perspective, 174; visibility of, 178–179; weight in, 168, 180, 182; withdrawal from outside world, 175; and womanhood, 169 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, 205 Pregnant bodies, as public, 178 Pre-Oedipal period, 135–36 Preservative love, 21 Preston, Sean, 217–18 Prilleltensky, Ora, 94 Private, 158–160 Pro-creation, choice, 50 Pro-Life, 217; Anti-abortion movement, 218 Proctor, Robert, 97 Psycho-analytical relations, 127; and gender, 127 Public, defi ned, 187n3; public/private, 178–79; open to general observation, 179; public sphere, 158

Q Queer Theory, 5 Quinn, Patricia, 97

R Race, 188n10 Rajczi, Alex, 187n7 Rape, 118 Rationality, 145 Rawls, John; Rawlsianism, 119 Reason, 224 Relationality, 134 Relations, mother-baby, 199; motherdaughter, 126–37; Freudian, 128–29; psycho-analytical, 127 Relaxation, 156 Religion, 109; women and mothers, 109 Renaissance, 220; art, 224 Reproduction, 118 Responsibility. See Care Ethics Rich, Adrienne, 4–6, 16, 180, 215, 226, 234n12, 241; doubling, 242

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Riddy, Felicity, 111 Rights based ethics, 193 Rivera, Diego, 228 Rome, art in, 221 Roman Catholic Church, 109–10; 116–19, sainthood and motherhood 107–19 Rose Garden for Pregnant Women and Midwives, Rӧsslin, Dr. Eucharis Rosin, Hanna, 54 Rӧsslin, Dr. Eucharis, 215; Rose Garden for Pregnant Women and Midwives, 225: The Byrthe of Mankinde, 225 Rothman, Barbara Katz, 184, 188n13 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 3, 198–99, Emile, 227; and wet-nurses, 222 Rozin, Paul et al, 88n5, n12 Rucklidge, Julie, 98 Ruddick, Sara, 4–5, 21–23, 31, 139, 143, 151–52, 153, 158, 161, 166; Preservative love, 21 Runswick-Cole, 94 Ruth, Book of, 70 Ryan, Sara, 94

S Sagehood, 172; as androgynous, 172, as more accessible to women than men, 172; and pregnancy, 172 Saints; Sainthood, 11, 107–125 Saled, Renata, 133 Sander-Staudt, Maureen, 1–17 Santo, Audrey, 11, 110; miracles, 110–14 Santo, Linda, 11, 107, 111 Saxton, Marsha, 102 Scheibinger, Londa, 97 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 116 Schueneman, Brooke, 14, 165–77 Sculpture, 221 Self, as individual, 153–55, 157–58; self-sacrifice, 151–55, 157 Sex, difference, 202–3, social significance of, 127 Sexism, 216 Sexual Division of Labor, 127 Sexual Orientation, 188n10 Sexuality; and breastfeeding, 53–54; and pregnancy, 41 Shaw, Joshua, 12, 138–50 Shaw, Rhonda, 71 Skitolsky, Lissa, 9, 64–78 Smoking, in pregnancy, 182

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Index

Spraug, Joey, 104n3 Social Security Insurance, 99 Society, 151–9 Socrates, 139, 165, 171, 185; and pregnancy, 171 Sons, as compensating for being born of women, 215 Soranus, 221 Sorbji, Richard, 176n7 Spears, Brittney, 217–19 Spiritual pregnancy, 171 St. Thérèse Lisieux, 107, 109, 121n4, n5 Standpoint Theory, 100, 102, 104n3 Star, Sara, 230 Step-child, step-children, 151, 156–57; needs of, 157–58; stepdaughter, 160 Step-families, 157 Step-mothers, 15, 151–61, as “bad” mothers, 155, 160; in comparison to “good” mothers double status, 156; in fairy tales, 155, 157; as hybrid beings, 155, 156, 158; lesbian, 159; as part of distributed mothering, 154; as positive models for care ethics; as primary care-giver, 157; as second-wife, 155; single, 159; as unnatural, 153 Sterilization, 183–84 Stern, Daniel, 134 Sterns, Cindy, 74 Stevens, Maureen, 234n24 Stoics, 166, 171–75 Stone, Alison, 12, 126–37 Stone-Mediatore, Shari, 102 Subject, 1–17; as disembodied, 195 Subjectivity, 1–17, 202 Sublime, 16–17, 237–50; ambiguity, 242; Burke, 240; and external threat, 243; fear of loss in, 241; feminist conceptions, 237, 249; in gestation, 237–38; horror in, 238; horror and delight, 239; impossibility in birth, 244; involving dread, 238; Kant, 240; masculinist conceptions, 238, 240, 248; philosophical theories of, 238; physical, 240; pregnant body, 241; and relational threat, 243; as safe in masculinist conceptions, 248; women’s strength in, 240

Sublimity, 237 Sukovatky, Becky, 13, 151–61 Sullivan, Shannon, 200, 212n4 Suvalescu, Julian, 187n8 Sweden, maternal leave policies, 209–10 Symposium, Plato, 139, 144

T Taoism, 3 Tea Party, 209 Thinking, 191 Tollefson, Christopher, 119 Torcello, Lawrence, 187n7 Totality and Infi nity, 141 Tradition. See myth Trebilicot, Joyce, 139 Trenka, Jane Jeong, 22 Tuana, Nancy, 222–23

U United Nations, 115, 118, 122n14 United States, concept of worker, 198; and hyper-individualism, 198; limited responsibility for maternal leave, 206 U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops,(USCCB), 114–15 U.S. Supreme Court, 183 Universal, universalized, 154, 157 Unnatural, seen nature

V Vagina Monologues, 219 Vatican, 115, 117–18 Vauchez, Andri, 107 Victim souls, 11, 109, 111, 121n7 Virgin Mary, 3, 108–10, 116, 121n3; 123n8, 215, 219, 230

W Walker, Brianna, 182 Waller, Jonathon, 230 Weight, preoccupation with in pregnancy, 168 Weis, Karen, 169 Weiss, Gail, 211 Welfare Reform, 99 Welldon, Estella, 130 Western culture, 215, 243; pretenses of individuality, 243 Wet nurses, 208, 225, 227 What to Expect when You’re Expecting, 40

Index Wicked step-mother. See step-mother Wife, second. See step-mother Williams, Joan, 207, 209 Witt, Charlotte, 23 Wolf, Alison, 34 Wolf, Jacqueline, 58 Wolf, Joan, 55 Wollan, Maria, 231 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 4 Womb, in Egyptian medicine, 222; “wandering of” 222 Women, 50; biological capacities as impediments, 199; definition, 22n3, 212n2; depictions after birth, 225; emotional orientation to other women, 131; “good”, 109; as lacking symbolic social

267

order, 202; as mothers, 5; as mothers in male minds, 215; in pregnancy, 169; slaves, 108; suspicion of groups of, 223 Woolf, Virginia, 233 Workers, ideal, 203 Workplace, 212 World Traveling 155–56, 159

Y You Tube, 23 Young, Iris Marion, 15, 168–70, 181, 185–86, 191, 194, 196–97, 242

Z Zamora, Martha, 228